Happy Sisyphus: A Review Article of G Palmer and a Butler, a Constitution for Aotearoa New Zealand
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article reviews Sir Geoffrey Palmer and Dr Andrew Butler's recent book, A Constitution for Aotearoa New Zealand, which proposes that New Zealand should radically reform its constitutional arrangements by entrenching an elaborate codified constitution, and making (most of) it judicially enforceable. The article contends that whatever the merits constitutional entrenchment in general, and the specific reform proposals made by Palmer and Butler as part of their proposal, their arguments for codifying and entrenching New Zealand's constitution are not convincing. The article outlines three reasons why this is so. First, Palmer and Butler's proposal will do less than they expect to secure public knowledge and understanding of New Zealand's constitutional arrangements. They will neither prevent the development of constitutional conventions nor obviate the need for a body of constitutional case law to go along with the entrenched text. Second, codifying and entrenching not only the most important constitutional rules but also details of government institutions or at least elaborate guiding principles for their operation tests the limits of human foresight and invites litigation and instability, especially in a legal culture that is not committed to originalist constitutional interpretation. And third, considering in some detail Palmer and Butler's proposal to entrench rights to liberty and security of the person, it is apparent that their arguments in support of this proposal do not engage with its likely implications, in particular regarding the extent of judicially imposed limits on democratic legislation based on these rights, such as those that have been developed in Canada.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.002 |
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".