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Record W4210304826 · doi:10.3138/utlj-2020-0125

Legal gaslighting

2021· article· en· W4210304826 on OpenAlexaffvenue
Alvin Y.H. Cheung

Bibliographic record

VenueUniversity of Toronto Law Journal · 2021
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicInternational Law and Human Rights
Canadian institutionsSocial Sciences and Humanities Research CouncilMcGill University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsLaw and economicsJurisdictionPolitical scienceNormativeLawPretextFunction (biology)Context (archaeology)ConfusionPoliticsAuthoritarianismRule of lawDemocracySociologyPsychology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Suppose that an authoritarian regime wants to make changes to legal norms or institutions to consolidate its hold on political power. Suppose further that the regime in question cannot simply ignore the domestic or international costs of doing so, and that it has an interest in responding to critiques of these changes based on liberal democratic norms and the rule of law. How can it do so? One possible approach is to sow confusion and undermine the normative standards themselves – in effect, to ‘gaslight’ the domestic or international audience (or both). To that end, a regime might assert that the change it proposes resembles a ‘best practice’ from one or more other jurisdictions. Such emulation need not be thorough, or even sincere; it may suffice simply to assert that a proposed change resembles that in a jurisdiction with ironclad rule-of-law credentials. The changes being adopted may bear no real resemblance to the ‘comparators’ on closer examination. Alternatively, the measures being adopted may be similar on their face, but operate in such a different context that they end up serving a very different function to the function they perform in the comparator jurisdiction. Such gaslighting need not succeed in deceiving outsiders or subjects; undermining the standards by which legal reforms are measured, sowing confusion, or providing a superficial pretext for inaction may be sufficient.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.984
Threshold uncertainty score0.993

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0080.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.010
GPT teacher head0.240
Teacher spread0.230 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations6
Published2021
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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