Bibliographic record
Abstract
Contemporary adjudication in national courts presents legal practitioners and theorists alike with some persistent puzzles about the kinds of legal resources that domestic judges can legitimately invoke. These seemingly arcane questions generate considerable interest, in no small part because of how they implicate the venerable but increasingly outmoded conception that has long held the legal imagination in its grip. Inspired by positivism, this picture of legal authority distinguishes sharply between binding and non-binding sources of law and consequently imagines the judge as either entirely free or completely constrained. Perhaps the strongest argument in favor of this traditional picture is found in the reception of international law in dualist domestic legal systems such as we find in many common law and mixed jurisdictions. However, because domestic judges consistently use international law in ways that the traditional view must count as mistakes, even this apparently strongest case seems to tell against, not for the traditional picture. A particularly dramatic example is found in the estoppel-like use of international law values. Thus, in cases across jurisdictions and across areas as diverse as the private law of contract and the recognition of foreign law, courts on occasion invoke non-binding international law as a reason to prohibit or bar the enforcement of formally valid legal acts. This paper examines the reasoning in these cases and argues that, far from being mistakes, they can actually be understood as part of an intelligible pattern of reasoning. Moreover, these recognizably legal patterns of reasoning resonate in important ways with other elements of the legal system. So rather than dismissing these unorthodox invocations of international law too quickly, we may instead be prompted to reflect on what they can tell us about the waning power of the traditional conception of legal authority.
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 | 0.006 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.042 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".