Bibliographic record
Abstract
Democratic constitutions often entrench provisions against formal amendment. For example, republicanism is formally unamendable in Italy, as is federalism in Germany, political pluralism in Portugal and secularism in Turkey. Neither the Canadian Constitution nor the United States Constitution entrenches a similar form of formal unamendability, but both entrench a peculiar form of unamendability that results not from constitutional design or constitutional law but from constitutional politics. Constructive unamendability derives from a political climate that makes it practically unlikely, though not the oretically impossible, to meet the high thresholds the constitution sets for formal amendment unless constitutional politics somehow perform heroics. Faced with the constructive unamendability of a rule they wish to formally amend, political actors may resort to arguably legal though illegitimate methods to circumvent the strictures preventing formal amendment. This paper classifies the many forms of unamendability, develops the concept of constructive unamendability, illustrates that the Senate in both Canada and the United States is constructively unamendable, and suggests how Canadian and American political actors might illegitimately amend the constructively unamendable Senate, a strategy the Government of Canada intended to pursue before the Supreme Court of Canada repudiated its Senate reform efforts in the recent Senate Reform Reference.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".