The Hidden Foreign Law Debate in Heller: The Proportionality Approach in American Constitutional Law
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This Article first describes the unique attributes of the use of foreign law in the Heller dissent, and then addresses the soundness of the specific claim that the United States and Europe share the common methodology of proportionality. This Article argues that Justice Breyer was correct in his contention that a doctrinal framework very similar to proportionality is embedded in American constitutional law in the guise of balancing. However, this Article argues that Breyer missed an important divergence between the two doctrines: the significantly different ways in which balancing and proportionality are situated in America and Europe, respectively, owing to their very different historical, cultural, and institutional characteristics.... This Article explores some indications that the introduction of proportionality into the constitutional law of other countries, such as Canada, may have contributed to their development of a more European frame of mind and has certainly facilitated more extensive dialogue with Europe.
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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 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".