Judicial Activism in Comparative Perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
What is understood by judicial activism in different jurisdictions? Beyond a superficial agreement, are we talking about the same phenomenon across countries and systems (or over time), and to what extent? This book seeks to articulate a comparative perspective on judicial activism, bringing together a selection of theoretical and empirical studies across different socio-political and institutional contexts. The chapters not only demonstrate the complexity of the concept, but also illustrate the different meanings of judicial activism across different types of political regimes, legal systems, and judicial institutions. The book looks at three examples from western democracies with common law systems (the U.S., the U.K., and Canada), and then at six examples from civil law systems in Latin American countries with very different experiences with judicial activism, democracy, and liberal constitutionalism: Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Paraguay, and Venezuela. These case studies are analyzed with reference to a common conceptual framework, assisted by a beginning theoretical essay and two concluding cross-national studies highlighting different theoretical and methodological approaches. This book contributes to current debates on a major topic in comparative law and courts research that, despite its importance in and outside the scholarly world, remains subject to significant debate. The book should be useful for students, teachers, and researchers across a variety of disciplines – including Constitutional Law, Comparative Law, Comparative Politics, Judicial Politics, and Sociolegal Studies.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".