The Sounds of Silence: The Supreme Constitutional Court of Egypt, Constitutional Crisis, and Constitutional Silence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Egyptian Supreme Constitutional Court (SCC) issued a series of decisive decisions during the transition period following Hosni Mubarak's resignation and the military coup of July 3, 2013. During the transition the SCC treated various declarations of the military as binding commands of a lawgiver which pre-empted the commands of all inferior lawgivers, including the military, when acting as a legislator. This hierarchical conception of law as a series of commands issuing from a hierarchy of superior and inferior lawgivers means that legality is determined solely by reference to a particular law's place in this hierarchy, without regard to the content of the command. In this conception of law, there is no place for constitutional inasmuch as the legislature and courts are seen simply as carrying out instructions of the constitutional lawgiver. The denial of constitutional in turns leads to judicial rhetoric that overdetermines the outcome of particular cases, and fails to tie outcomes of cases to any shared conception of legality between the sovereign and the citizens. This approach to deciding cases negates the possibility that silence may be filled by other lawgivers through a deliberative political process. By refusing to accept a place for constitutional silence, the SCC's jurisprudence enshrines a kind of despotism which exacerbates constitutional conflict, rather than mitigating it, by creating incentives for constitutional drafters to write ever more specific constitutional rules to enshrine particular outcomes rather than creating a framework for shared governance.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.035 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.014 |
| 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".