A Look Back at Looking Forward: Ronald St. John Macdonald and the Future of International Law
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Summary In May 1973, an article entitled “International Law and Society in the Year 2000” written by Ronald St. John Macdonald, Gerald Morris, and Douglas Johnson, appeared in the Canadian Bar Review. The article attempted to provide a vision of what international law would look like three decades in the future. If Macdonald and his co-authors were mistaken about some of the details they forecasted, they were deWnitely right about the multiplication of actors, the growing diversity of sources, and the expanded coverage of international law. More particularly, they were correct in their assessment that environmental concerns — as opposed to the more evident military, humanitarian, or criminal ones — would be the principal catalyst for change in times to come. A look back at “International Law and Society in the Year 2000” therefore offers a valuable retrospective on Macdonald’s contribution to international law and helps to frame the central question that we must take up in our own time: how will international law evolve from here?
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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 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".