Fiduciaries of Humanity: How International Law Constitutes Authority (Chapters 1 & 7)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This document contains the front matter (including table of contents), Chapter 1, and Chapter 7 of our monograph Fiduciaries of Humanity: How International Law Constitutes Authority (Oxford University Press 2016). We argue that under international law today, states serve as fiduciaries of humanity, and their authority to govern and represent their people is dependent on their satisfaction of numerous duties, the most general of which is to establish a regime of secure and equal freedom on behalf of the people subject to their power. International institutions also serve as fiduciaries of humanity and are subject to similar fiduciary obligations. The fiduciary theory reconciles state sovereignty and responsibility by explaining how a state's obligations to its people are constitutive of its legal authority under international law. We elaborate and defend the fiduciary model while exploring its application to a variety of current topics and controversies, including human rights, emergencies, the treatment of detainees in counterterrorism operations, humanitarian intervention, and the protection of refugees fleeing persecution.Chapter 1 introduces the book's argument. The chapter begins by examining the classical model of sovereignty, which posits that states wield absolute authority within their respective jurisdictions. It then discusses a variety of features of contemporary international law that are in tension with the classical model, suggesting that states are now obligated under international law to use their sovereign powers to advance the interests of their people. The chapter explains how this relational conception of sovereignty is consistent with the idea that states serve as fiduciaries for humanity, and it outlines three philosophical accounts of states' fiduciary obligations, drawing on the writings of Immanuel Kant, John Locke, and Joseph Raz. Lastly, the chapter summarizes the arguments developed in subsequent chapters of the book.Chapter 7 discusses the fiduciary theory’s implications for the protection of refugees under international law. It argues that the fiduciary theory of sovereignty best explains the duty of non-refoulement as a peremptory norm of international law. A state's obligation to provide refuge to foreign nationals fleeing persecution abroad flows from the intersection of the state’s position as a joint trustee of the earth's surface on behalf of humanity, on the one hand, and its position as a local fiduciary that international law entrusts with sovereignty over the people within a certain territory, on the other. As a fiduciary of humanity, the state acquires a cosmopolitan duty to grant refuge when an individual fleeing irresoluble threats to her human rights appears at its border.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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".