Bibliographic record
Abstract
The influential work of the late Anglo-Canadian public law scholar John Willis is used as a launching pad to explore several of the shortcomings and strengths of the functionalist and realist views he espoused in his writings. His analytic approach is then contrasted with Lon Fuller’s functionalism in order to disclose how, in Canadian jurisprudence, the unwritten principle of the rule of law appears as a fundamental Fullerian politico-legal fiction requiring the endorsement and practice of the three ‘cults’ Willis dismissed as dangerous and unpromising: individualism, participatory democracy, and openness as a principle of good government. Contrary to Willis, courts are no longer the least important branch and constitutional democracies can no longer distinguish so cleanly among lawyers’ values, civil servants’ values, and citizens’ values. Canada now has a blend called ‘Charter values’ that define and shape both the legal imaginary and the imagined political community. While appreciating the strengths of Willis’s perspective on the dangers of judicial review, and acknowledging several shortcomings in Fuller’s thought, the author argues that Fuller’s thinking about the rule of law best elucidates the idea of ‘institutional dialogue’ in contemporary constitutional discourse. The article concludes by suggesting that when judges use this metaphor, they are engaging in a public discourse about the legislature and the judiciary as coordinate institutions in a constitutional order and how this ideal relationship can be realized through concrete institutional practices.
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 | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.098 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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".