Customary International Law in Domestic Courts: Imbroglio, Lord Denning, Stare Decisis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The paper challenges the proposition that customary international law is automatically a part of the common law in Canada and, by extension, other countries of the Anglo-Saxon legal family. It proposes a more nuanced approach which is better in keeping with the divergent natures of international and national law. The point of focus is a major flaw in the reasoning by Lord Denning in the Trendtex case, which is responsible for the general belief that international customs obey the logics of monism. His Lordship held that dualism could not apply to customs (unlike treaties) because of the doctrine of precedents in common law; monism is the model, otherwise stare decisis would mean that changes in the normativity on the international plane could not be reflected in the domestic law. But nowadays, stare decisis does not mean (assuming it once did) that old precedents will stand in the way of allowing judge-made law to evolve. Arguably, this was already the situation when the Trendtex case was decided in 1977, thus making Lord Denning's ruling fall flat.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".