Constitutions, Judicial Review, Moral Rights, and Democracy: Disentangling the Issues
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Should countries have constitutions? Should there be American or Canadian-style judicial review of constitutional questions? Should constitutions have provisions establishing rights? Or is there a fundamental right to decide democratically the most important issues confronting us and, particularly, the content of the rights we possess? These questions are frequently not distinguished, with the predictable result that an answer to one is taken to be an answer to another. I intend, however, to make it clear that and why they are separate questions. SHOULD COUNTRIES HAVE CONSTITUTIONS? First, what does it mean to have a constitution? Answering this question is not easy. For one thing, a constitution need not be written. It is oft said that the British have an “unwritten constitution,” which is not just an ironic way of saying they do not have one. And there are numerous treatises and other scholarly works devoted to British “constitutional law.” There are, of course, quite compelling reasons why modern constitutions tend to be written, especially if they are lengthy and complex. But nothing in the nature of constitutions requires that they be written. A more promising way of thinking about constitutions is in terms of their being “higher law.” Put differently, constitutions are what validate ordinary law – the law produced by legislative and administrative bodies and by common-law courts. Ordinary law is valid law, when it is so, just because it is authorized by the higher law of the constitution.
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 | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| 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".