Constituent Power and Carl Schmitt's Theory of Constitution in Kenya's Constitution-Making Process
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The decade-long constitutional reform process in Kenya spans two phases. The first ended with a High Court decision that the constitution-making process was unconstitutional because it failed to provide an opportunity for the exercise of constituent power by the Kenyan people. In the second phase Parliament sought to shield substantive questions of constitutional design from the reach of the constituent power. Drawing on Carl Schmitt’s constitutional theory, this article argues that although paradoxical, such treatment of the constituent power is theoretically coherent. Reading Schmitt’s theory closely reveals that, despite himself, Schmitt accepts limitation of the constituent power where the nature of law and liberal constitutionalism demand it. The article does not apply Schmitt’s constitutional theory, so much as read it against itself to suggest that it bears close resemblance to Fuller’s and Dworkin’s jurisprudence. At the same time, the article seeks to understand the Kenyan constitutional reform process, and ultimately questions whether the limitations placed on the constituent power in Kenya are consistent with theoretically acceptable limitations.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".