MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W4414620344 · doi:10.1017/s135232522510075x

Can We Legally Revise the Highest Legal Rule?

2025· article· en· W4414620344 on OpenAlexaff
Manish Oza

Bibliographic record

VenueLegal Theory · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicLegal Systems and Judicial Processes
Canadian institutionsWestern University
FundersUniversity of Wisconsin-Madison
KeywordsLegal realismField (mathematics)Legal ethicsLegal researchRule of lawLegal professionEmpirical legal studies

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract This paper is about whether we can revise the highest rule in a legal system using legal reasoning. HLA Hart and Alf Ross argued that we can’t: either the highest rule is unchangeable, or it can only be changed in a revolution—a merely causal change, not a legal one. I argue, drawing on an idea from Hartry Field about logic and epistemology, that we can. The emergence of the conclusion, within a legal system, that the highest rule should be replaced by something else can provide a legal reason for the change. In making the change, we act for reasons internal to the legal system. This allows us to make sense of the distinction, recognized by legal subjects, between a revolution and a legal change of sovereignty.

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 machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.026
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.064
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.026
Threshold uncertainty score0.140

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0260.064
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0020.001
Science and technology studies0.0060.043
Scholarly communication0.0120.017
Open science0.0040.005
Research integrity0.0070.011
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0070.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.011
GPT teacher head0.287
Teacher spread0.276 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venueLegal TheorySame topicLegal Systems and Judicial ProcessesFrench-language works237,207