THE USES AND LIMITS OF LEGALISM: ON PATRICK MACKLEM’S <i>THE SOVEREIGNTY OF HUMAN RIGHTS</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Human rights have become the language of justice in our globalizing world. Yet, curiously, despite many rounds of debate over moral versus political conceptions, little attention has been paid to the meaning of human rights as international legal concepts. The specific normative significance of the fact that human rights are legal norms of the international legal order and the implications this has for the nature and justice of that order has gotten lost in the fray. This article addresses Patrick Macklem’s excellent attempt to fill that gap. He is right that a key function of international human rights law is to mitigate the injustices of an international legal order that distributes sovereignty to states. A legal conception of human rights is indeed needed to get at the distinctive normative role international human rights documents play as law. But I argue that, while such an analysis can and must supplement other approaches, no adequate understanding of human rights as international legal norms can dispense with moral justifications of them. Otherwise, the purpose and specificity of human rights as distinct from the rights of corporations and other non-human entities gets obscured and the priority of the human rights of human persons, vis-à-vis other legal persons, is undermined.
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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 | 0.010 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.082 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.019 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".