The Frontiers of Nullification and Anticommandeering: Federalism and Extrajudicial Constitutional Interpretation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In federal systems, non-judicial actors can engage in constitutional reasoning. The actions taken may come in different legal forms. Some may be consistent with positive law, while others may not. Nullification and anticommandeering are prominent examples. We show that these concepts have functionally made new appearances in Canada. One significant example of this is Alberta’s enactment of the 2022 Sovereignty Act. We trace how the initial proposal for the legislation resembled nullification. Over time, the proposal was reformed to adapt it to the particularities of Canadian federalism. The result was a Sovereignty Act that appears to assert existing provincial powers, particularly as a formal framework for extrajudicial constitutional interpretation via anticommandeering, although only time will tell if this remains the case in practice. In doing so, we shine a light on the contours of some of the legal and political debates that may arise as the framework is operationalized.
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 imitationNot 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.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".