Bibliographic record
Abstract
The three oldest common law federations: Australia, Canada and the United States of America, have quite different conceptions of common law, and have applied quite different structural approaches to its development. In particular, each federation resolves the following two basal questions differently: (a) Are there distinct bodies of subnational common law? (b) Is there a distinct body of federal common law? While the common law of California is unquestionably a distinct body of law, there is no distinct body of law known as the common law of British Columbia or the common law of Queensland. However, Canada mirrors the United States and differs from Australia in having a distinct body of federal common law, and while the North American bodies of federal common law are interstitial rather than general, they have the unexpected property of overriding subnational statutes. This paper describes those divergences, how they came about, and why these issues continue to matter. The key to the first question is the structure of appellate jurisdiction, but the paper seeks to demonstrate that there are subtler considerations informing the result. There is no short answer to the why and how federal common law evolved or failed to evolve, but similar considerations continue to influence litigation to this day, not merely in questions of construction and the role of precedent, but also in the articulation of new rights, defences and immunities arising from federal law.
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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".