Proportionality and the Inevitability of the Local: A Comparative Localist Analysis of Canada and Ireland
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The principle of proportionality is held out as a truly international tool of constitutional law—a uniform process for assessing the legitimacy of restrictions of rights around the world. This Article critiques that viewpoint, using what the author terms a comparative localist approach: looking at the detail how proportionality is used in two broadly similar jurisdictions—Canada and Ireland—that use a linguistically identical version of the principle. It examines differences in the application of the individual elements of the test in both places, and broader differences not related to any one individual part of the test. The analysis reveals that the countries apply the principle in drastically different ways. The Article argues that despite the supposed consistency and uniformity that the proportionality test’s language and structure suggest, the application of the test is fundamentally and entirely contingent on local, contextual considerations and influences that will always change the way it applies. The test itself has very little fixed content. It suggests that both the international and domestic local scholarship about proportionality underestimates the fundamentality of this problem, thinking variability not to compromise the integrity of the concept of proportionality. This is because international scholarship is too general to see the extent of these specific problems at the local level, while local scholarship attributes these problems to national misapplication rather than problems with the test in general. Only with a comparative localist analysis can these problems be laid bare. The Article concludes by asking what we can make of proportionality in light of these observations, arguing that proportionality is a rhetoric that stitches together divergent practices, and considering whether it should be retained in light of that reality.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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 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".