Bibliographic record
Abstract
Scholarship has posited two models of constitutionalism. One is short, abstract, and rigid, like the United States Constitution. The other is lengthy, detailed, and flexible, like the constitutions found in many U.S. states and in many other countries around the world. This Article argues that there is a descriptively common and normatively attractive third model: tiered constitutional design. A tiered design aims to combine the virtues of rigidity and flexibility by creating different rules of constitutional amendment for different parts of the constitution. Most provisions are made fairly easy to change, but certain articles or principles are given higher levels of entrenchment. A tiered design can potentially preserve space for needed updates to the constitutional text, a virtue of flexible design, while also providing stability for the core of the constitution and protection against antidemocratic forms of constitutional change, a benefit of rigid forms of constitutionalism as demonstrated by Article V of the U.S. Constitution. Drawing on numerous examples of tiered designs including U.S. states like California and countries as diverse as Canada, Ecuador, India, and Ghana, this Article offers a critical analysis of the architecture of tiered designs and explores how they work in practice. While finding unsurprisingly that enforcement is often imperfect, this Article concludes that judicial and popular enforcement of tiered designs does show promise in helping to combat the wave of antidemocratic constitutional projects that is threatening to engulf much of the world.
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 | 0.017 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.002 |
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".