Ghosts and Straw Men: A Comment on Miriam Smith's ''Ghosts of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council''
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Readers of Miriam Smith's article1 who have not also read our recent book, The Charter Revolution and the Court Party, may conclude that she is critical of everything in that book. This would be a mistake, since nowhere in her article does she challenge the two central claims of the book: (1) that there has been a “Charter revolution,” and (2) that this revolution can be explained only in terms of a supporting constituency. Smith accepts these central claims, which are made also by Charles Epp in his fine book, The Rights Revolution: Lawyers, Activists, and Supreme Courts in Comparative Perspective, a book Smith praises (9, n. 12; 11). Smith disagrees primarily with our characterization of the Charter revolution as undemocratic. She prefers Epp's view that the rights revolution is democratic because it rests “on a support structure that has a broad base in civil society” (11; quoting Epp, Rights, 199) precisely, that is, because it is supported by what we call a Court Party and Epp calls a “support structure for legal mobilization.”
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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 | 0.008 | 0.023 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.058 | 0.052 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.002 |
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".