The Transnational Judicial Discourse and Felon Disenfranchisement: Re-examining the Textual Premise of Richardson v. Ramirez
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article is simultaneously an international comparative law piece about prisoner disenfranchisement in various countries, a transnational work of legal theory providing a framework for the use of foreign law in domestic constitutional courts, and a domestic analysis of the constitutional underpinnings of felon disenfranchisement.\nThe article begins with a comprehensive comparative analysis of the recent prisoner disenfranchisement decisions in Canada, South Africa, and Europe. It notes that the over-arching theme of these decisions is to view the acceptability of prisoner disenfranchisement along a continuum, where it becomes more acceptable the more serious the offense committed.\nThe article then examines the growing phenomenon of a “transnational judicial discourse” between domestic, foreign, and international courts, distinguishing the more controversial universalist and genealogical interpretations of the transnational judicial discourse from the less controversial dialogical interpretation of the discourse which has been separately endorsed by six justices of the US Supreme Court.\nAgainst this background, the article then examines the transnational judicial discourse on felon disenfranchisement, suggesting that the concept of a continuum of applicability taken from the international cases can inform the domestic debate on this issue. Specifically, it questions the current understanding that the framers of section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment were sanctioning disenfranchisement for every kind of crime along the continuum of applicability. After an examination of the legislative history of the Fourteenth Amendment, it concludes that this was not the framers’ intent; rather, they only intended the disenfranchisement of those committing crimes of rebellion or disloyalty to the State, such as treason.\nWith the textual barrier removed and the door open to a more nuanced constitutional examination of felon disenfranchisement for various crimes, the article concludes by offering some predictions on what a continuum of applicability of felon disenfranchisement would look like under strict scrutiny analysis.
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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 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.041 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".