An American Jurist in London: Bruce Ackerman's Proposals for Constitutional Reform in the UK Versus Bruce Ackerman's Constitutional Theory
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The American constitutional theorist Bruce Ackerman has recently suggested that the UK Parliament should call a constitutional convention to draft a written constitution that can be put to voters in a national referendum after a two-year drafting period. In this article, I examine a number of points of disjoint between these proposals and Ackerman’s own, “dualist” theory of constitutional change, developed from an intriguingly novel reading of American constitutional history. While this theory advocates generation-spanning, multi-institutional processes of constitutional change, Ackerman’s UK proposals involve a more fleeting and nationalistic approach, with unitary majorities apparently reigning supreme. The question is: can this disjoint between Ackerman 1 and Ackerman 2 be justified as Ackerman’s attempt to work within the contours of the UK’s constitutional culture, traditionally conceived? Or might Ackerman’s unfiltered American theory have something important to offer a UK audience today, given the divisions that the Brexit process has revealed in British society between opposing, traditional and non-traditional understandings of British sovereignty and democracy?
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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 | 0.010 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.035 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".