1 The View from the Bench: Where the Comparative Judicial Imagination Travels
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This chapter explores how constitutional courts and judges conceive of comparative constitutional law, what methods they use to engage with it, and how and why they vary in their approach. The chapter surveys the changing patterns of voluntary judicial reference to foreign sources and the explanations for these. It addresses the decrease in reference to the UK and US apex courts and the rise in stature of other courts. Patterns of foreign citations by the Supreme Courts of Canada, India, and especially Israel are examined. The chapter develops the argument that the sociopolitical context within which constitutional courts and judges operate affects whether and where the judicial mind travels in its search for citation of foreign sources. It shows that the “identity” dimension—the attempt to define who “we” are as a political community—inevitably influences comparative jurisprudence and acts as a key factor explaining judicial choices of reference sources.
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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 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.054 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.022 | 0.023 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".