Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite the tremendous renaissance of comparative constitutional law, the comparative aspect of the enterprise, as a method and a project, remains under-theorized and imprecise. In a recent book of mine, Comparative Matters: The Renaissance of Comparative Constitutional Law (Oxford University Press, 2014), I address this gap by charting the intellectual history and analytical underpinnings of comparative constitutional inquiry, probing the various types, aims, and methodologies of engagement with the constitutive laws of others through the ages, and exploring how and why comparative constitutional inquiry has been and ought to be pursued by academics and jurists worldwide. The future of comparative constitutional studies, I contend, lies in relaxing the sharp divide between constitutional law and the social sciences. This essay is part of a Boston Law Review symposium on Comparative Matters. It responds to creative and challenging interventions by Anna di Robilant, Tom Ginsburg, Vicki Jackson and Katharine Young. All four contributors to this symposium see great virtue in one variant or another of my call for a more interdisciplinary scholarship in comparative public law. At the same time, the contributions to this symposium raise several powerful concerns that, at least in my reading, are aimed to complement and problematize, not to dismiss, the arguments I put forth in Comparative Matters. I address each of these challenges in turn. More than a book symposium per se, this multi-participant exchange sparks precisely the kind of conversation I had hoped Comparative Matters would generate. The four responses, as well as the groundswell of reaction elsewhere, affirm the significance of such a discussion. Taken as a whole, this symposium reveals both the tremendous intellectual potential and the challenges present in seeking to turn the promise of interdisciplinary discourse, methodological pluralism, and problem-driven inquiry into a reality for comparative constitutional studies.
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 | 0.046 | 0.100 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.056 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.027 | 0.039 |
| Open science | 0.009 | 0.022 |
| Research integrity | 0.050 | 0.057 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.003 |
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".