Three-Quarters Empty or One-Quarter Full? Martha Derthick on the Courts, Federalism, and Public Policy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
During the last two decades of her career, Martha Derthick wrote extensively on the role of courts; but this work has received little attention compared to her earlier scholarship. This article analyzes her primary concerns about the judiciary. For her, courts, both federal and state, often abetted centralization, made government less representative, engaged in their own forms of judicial demagogy, and made policymaking more theoretical, less practical, and therefore less effective. This article addresses each of these concerns as they emerged in Derthick’s work on federalism, tobacco politics, and education. Even though she was pessimistic about the effects of adversarial legalism on the U.S. constitutional system, there were signs in her scholarship that the system might be less fragile than she feared. I conclude by discussing areas where courts retreated to, what to her, was a more defensible position.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".