Why Rome Didn’t Bark in the Night: Some Thoughts on Crisis Government & Constitutional Flexibility
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Why are we so puzzled by prerogative? Nearly every republic has had emergency prerogative powers, which most republican thinkers have considered natural and necessary to a state’s survival. But Americans are hugely suspicious of these powers, even while they make frequent use of them. This paper uses the case of the Roman Dictatorship to explore a possible explanation for this reticence. The Romans embraced their emergency institutions but they also took for granted that government should be flexible, adapting to circumstance. By contrast, the idea of flexibility is anathema to contemporary understandings of constitutionality. Only fixed/written institutions described in a written constitution, on this common view, can provide stability and a bulwark against abuses of state power. While specific uses of emergency power can be subject to a range of moral difficulties, tainting perceptions of prerogative as such, I argue that suspicion of flexible government plays an important role as well. The article shows why these suspicions are ill-founded. Specific uses of prerogative are fraught with danger, but flexible institutions in themselves are no cause for concern.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.040 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".