Judicial Review of Constitutional Transitions: War and Peace and Other Sundry Matters
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Constitutional transition periods present a twilight time between two executives. At such times, the outgoing executive’s authority is questionable because of the democratic difficulties and agency concerns that arise at the end of the executive’s term. Thus, parliamentary systems developed constitutional conventions that restrict caretaker governments’ action. These conventions seem to achieve the desired results in the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. In contrast, in the United States, the prevailing norm is that there is only one president at a time, and this is the incumbent president, who is fully authorized to govern the country and his or her discretion is unfettered. Transition periods are thus exploited by U.S. lame-duck presidents to make last minute appointments, regulations, and even international agreements. Israel does not fit either of the two poles in the dichotomy between parliamentary systems that successfully deal with caretaker authority and presidential systems that do not. Though a parliamentary system, its constitutional history is full of examples of abuse of caretaker power. This has led Israel’s Supreme Court to treat the sphere of authority of caretaker governments as justiciable in contrast to other courts’ treatment of the subject. Exploring its case law in issues of war, peace, and other lesser matters offers a rich case study of the standards that should govern this unexplored legal–political area. Using Israel as a case study within a comparative constitutional framework, this Article suggests three important lessons: First, it is not the nature of the constitutional system per se, whether parliamentary or presidential, that determines the success of preventing abuses of transitional governments’ power. Rather, the potential for abuse exists in both types of systems. Furthermore, the challenges posed by these transitional governments are similar in both types of systems. Second, transitional governments’ power is not a topic that courts are inherently unable to regulate. Rather, if constitutional conventions fail to do their job or do not evolve, judicial review is a potent possibility. Last, it is not enough to determine that transitional governments must act with restraint, as the Israeli Supreme Court has determined, but it is important to give concrete meaning to which actions are permitted by transitional governments and the circumstances under which they are allowed. The Article concludes by delineating such general guidelines.
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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 | 0.056 | 0.106 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.014 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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".