Juxtaposing Constitution-Making and Constitutional-Infringement Mechanisms in Israel and Canada: On the Interplay between Common Law Override and Sunset Override
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores the often neglected relationships between constitution-making (including amendment) mechanisms and constitutional-infringement mechanisms by focusing on the override as one of the possible tools to depart from a Constitution. The article suggests that there are two types of override: a ‘common law override’, which is not uniquely Canadian, and a ‘sunset override’. The common law override evolves in the judicial decisions of a given country when the courts require the legislature to explicitly take responsibility for an action. Under the common law override, we may couple together phenomena that are not typically connected, including a means of protecting common law rights, a judicial presumption against delegation of power to administrative agencies, and mechanisms of dealing with procedural or substantive legislative entrenchment. In contrast, the sunset override is a Canadian invention. For the tool to be part of the infringement mechanisms of a country's Constitution, it must be provided for explicitly in that Constitution, and its exercise must be temporary. This article follows the various possible uses of the common law override. It shows that Israel has vast experience with the common law override which may shed light on Israel's future possible exploitation of the sunset override. The article then shows that Israel has adopted the sunset override following the Canadian example. When the Rabin government adopted the tool as part of an exchange deal with the ultra-orthodox religious political party Shas, the terms of the deal included Shas' acquiescence to the peace process in exchange for the Rabin government's use of the override to protect the religious status quo from judicial intervention. In addition, the Israeli justices played an active and unique role in the birth and formulation of the Israeli override. As has happened with the Canadian override, supposedly these circumstances should have made the override illegitimate in Israel. However, this article argues that it is not the political uses of the override that result in its lack of use. Rather, the determining factor is the override's compatibility with the constitution-making process in a given country. From a normative perspective, it is easier for the Israeli legislature to override its own earlier enactments, even those titled Basic Laws, than it is for the Canadian legislature to override the People's enactment of the Charter. Thus, it is expected that Israel might more freely deploy the sunset override were it to become a general mechanism embodied in the Basic Laws, while, in contrast, the sunset override has fallen into disuse in Canada.
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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 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".