Public law and ordinary legal method: Revisiting Dicey’s approach to <i>droit administratif</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, the author considers the basic character of public law in the common law tradition by returning to AV Dicey’s famous assertion that public law is ‘ordinary’ law. Dicey made this claim in the course of articulating a theory of the rule of law within the common law tradition, and he juxtaposed that theory with the idea of public law within the civil law tradition, using French droit administratif as his central target of attack. Dicey’s ideas have attracted considerable criticism and are now generally out of favour. However, once the idea of public law as ordinary is reconsidered in light of its genesis within the long history of common law discourse concerning law and state power, and once Dicey’s own evolving attitudes about French droit administratif are considered, the idea can be seen to offer important insights into the ideal of legality today. The core insight, in the end, is the simple idea that if the rule of law means anything, the law that rules must embrace the qualities that law ordinarily embraces – that public law is, in the end, the product of ordinary legal method.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.040 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".