International Law in Domestic Courts: A Conflict of Laws Approach
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The relationship between international law and domestic law is rarely understood as a conflict of laws. Understanding it in this way opens up a parallel with the field of conflict of laws: the field for which the relationship between legal systems, especially the role of another system's jurisdiction, laws, and judgments vis-à-vis the domestic legal system, are exactly the bread-and-butter issues. We argue for such an approach to international law in domestic courts: an approach that we elaborate as "theory through technique."\nIn our view, conflicts should be seen broadly as the discipline that developed to deal with conflicts between laws, without necessarily being committed to any one method or policy. Surprisingly, we demonstrate that it is precisely the seemingly negative features of conflicts - the field's high degree of technicality disparaged as a "conflict-of-laws machine" and the multitude of theories famously deemed a "dismal swamp" - that figure among the advantages of a conflict-of-laws approach to international law in domestic courts.\nA conflict-of-laws approach offers ways to respect the nature of international law as law, without simplifying that nature by characterizing it exactly as domestic law. In addition, seeing the parallel with conflict of laws brings a wealth of experience that can enrich and refine the debate on international law in domestic courts. Finally, the parallel with conflicts changes international law in domestic courts from a specific problem addressed by international and constitutional lawyers into a general problem of relativism - which, we argue, conflict of laws is uniquely positioned to address.
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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 | 0.009 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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".