European constitutional scholars in the digital public sphere: reply to Somek and Paar
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In their recent article ‘Europe’s political constitution’, Alexander Somek and Elisabeth Paar conclude: ‘scholactivism is the form of constitutional law of Europe. There is nothing below or above it. It is all there is’. In this reply I want to take issue with such (rather bleak) view of what European constitutional scholarship is about. Firstly, I argue that scholactivism undermines the very conditions of scholarship as a pursuit of knowledge autonomous from both public and private power. The current attacks on academic institutions by authoritarian governments, and also the increasing dependence of research on private funders result, at least in part, from the politicization of scholarship. Secondly, I argue that we should be more critical towards the infrastructure of the digital public sphere, which Somek and Paar see to be emerging through blogs and other platforms, and be more protective of the existing practices that we inherited from our predecessors.
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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 | 0.035 | 0.103 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.038 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.031 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.051 | 0.045 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.002 |
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".