Judicial Hegemony: Dworkin’s <i>Freedom’s Law</i> and the Spectrum of Constitutional Democracies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ronald Dworkin’s Freedom’s Law offers a solution to a thorny problem in American constitutional law. He argues that the authority of the American Supreme Court to make the final determination on constitutional questions is consistent with democratic principles. In this paper, I try to show that his solution is unsatisfactory because it permits the possibility of a judicial usurpation of authority that is inconsistent with his characterization of democratic principles. Freedom’s Law is also a bold attempt to offer prescriptions for constitutional democracies generally. By drawing a distinction between two concepts of authority, I object to this effort. I argue that Dworkin’s analysis assumes the operation of a conception of authority that I label the pyramid model. I also introduce a bipolar model of authority and try to show its application to the Canadian constitutional scheme. On this basis, I conclude that his prescriptions are relevant only for a portion of the spectrum of constitutional democracies.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".