Cosmopolitan Originalism: Revisiting the Role of International Law in Constitutional Interpretation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The issue of consulting international law in the interpretation of national constitutions is polarising. Both in Australia and abroad, judicial and academic responses have lacked precision and subtlety. While originalists have decried the idea of using contemporary international law to construe constitutions, non-originalists have argued that constitutions should be updated to better reflect international human rights law. This article presents a middle road between two untenable extremes. It revisits the problematic association between originalism and localism, and explores the prospect of cosmopolitan originalism. While insisting upon fidelity to the text of the Australian Constitution, this article recognises that international law is a valuable interpretive resource. In order to challenge the reluctance of originalists to consult contemporary international law, this article outlines several pathways, compatible with moderate originalism, which permit recourse to international law. The role of the common law, the ambiguity inherent in constitutional texts and the distinctive features of international law help to overcome traditional originalist objections. This article finds that although originalism constrains the role which international law can play in constitutional interpretation, originalism is not a barrier to robust engagement with international law.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".