Bibliographic record
Abstract
For centuries courts across the common law world have developed their systems of law by building bodies of judicial decisions. By deciding individual cases, common law courts settle litigation and move the law in new directions. Apex courts which sit at the apex of common law systems fulfil these standard dispute-resolution and law-development functions, but they also have a unique institutional position. By virtue of their place at the top of the judicial hierarchy, the decisions of apex courts and, in particular, the language used in those decisions, resonate through the legal system. Moreover, members of the legal community – judges, lawyers, legal academics, students and laypeople – often look to apex courts for general guidance. Accordingly, the institutional position of apex courts may nudge them away from incremental development of the law based on the resolution of individual cases and towards the elaboration of general principles that can unify large areas of the law and provide meaningful guidance to the legal community and the general public. The development of the common law has typically been seen as a ‘bottom-up’ exercise, with courts proceeding by analogy from case to case without guidance from tablets of stone delivered from on high, whereas an apex court’s position in its national legal system may push it to prefer a ‘top-down’ approach designed to achieve coherence in the application of law by lower courts. The overarching theme of this collection is the influence of apex courts on the development of the common law. In particular, how the institutional position of apex courts causes them to shape the common law; and conversely how the traditions of the common law shape the way apex courts conceive of their role. Contributors from around the common law world address the overarching theme in three different contexts: first, the particular characteristics of the apex courts of several selected jurisdictions; second, the influence if any of constitutionalism and bills of rights on apex courts’ relationships to the common law; and third, how apex courts have treated core concepts such as causation, restitution, good faith and property. This introduction provides an overview of the major themes of the collection as a whole and of the individual chapters.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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".