Ely in the world: The global legacy of Democracy and Distrust forty years on
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract John Hart Ely’s Democracy and Distrust is a classic among US theories of judicial review. But how far does Ely’s global influence reach? And how useful is Ely’s process-based theory for judges operating in systems with a thicker, more substantive understanding of rights and constitutionalism, as prevails in many countries of the Global South, or in a system like Germany? In this introduction to a Symposium on Ely’s broader global influence, we sketch out some first answers to these questions, based on the contributions, which cover Mexico, Chile and Bolivia, South Africa, and Germany, as well as Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. If Ely’s influence is considerable in some states, most notably New Zealand, it is marginal in others. Even where Ely arguably has been influential, however, his theory has usually been subject to a process of comparative adaptation, to increase its fit with the local legal and political context. Tweaked and adapted, Ely’s work can also inspire the construction of new comparative “political process” theories, including in systems where we encounter a thicker, or even transformative, understanding of constitutionalism.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| 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 | 0.000 |
| 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".