Constitutional Statecraft in Malaysian Courts: A Naive ‘Schmittian’ Misappropriation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In her recent book, Constitutional Statecraft in Asian Courts, Yvonne Tew develops an ambitious argument for empowering Malaysian judges to promote constitutional democracy. Her arguments rely on the idea of an unamendable constitutional ‘basic structure’ or ‘meta-Constitution’ expressive of that ideal. I argue that her proposals are normatively inadequate to this task because Tew relies on resources in constitutional theory traceable to the conservative German thinker Carl Schmitt, whose views about constitutional legitimacy and limits to constitutional amendment form part of an authoritarian political logic designed to subvert constitutional democracy that subordinates legality to power politics. I then argue that Tew's proposals, if applied to Malaysia, risk feeding into elements of Schmittian authoritarian logic that plausibly underwrite Malaysia's ethnocratic context, and conjecture (through case-analysis) that authoritarian judges could easily reconfigure her proposals to legitimate ethno-authoritarian rule. Conversely, conscientious judges who defend constitutional democracy would adopt a non-Schmittian approach that emphasises the normative priority of legality as a constraint on political power to counter ethno-authoritarian rule. Consequently, despite Tew's aspiration to equip judges with tools to defend constitutional democracy, the tools she provides threaten to undermine this aspiration such that her proposals may be characterised as a naïve Schmittian misappropriation.
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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 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".