Judicial activism : authority, principle and policy in the judicial method
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Based on the 55th series of the Hamlyn Lectures presented by the Honourable Justice Michael Kirby in November 2003, the issue of Judicial Activism is a live one in most countries of the common law. The accusation that judges have exceeded their proper function is often made by politicians, media commentators and even some lawyers. The accusers allege that judges should stick to applying the law - they should not make it. The slightest familiarity with current and recent debates over decisions in Australia, Canada, India and the United States shows that judicial is a topic that lawyers need to address seriously. In these lectures, Justice Kirby explores many cases including Bush v Gore and Lawrence v Texas from the United States. In examining the method in a topical context, Justice Kirby suggests that the debate over activism has so far largely passed the judiciary of the United Kingdom by. However, he points out that recent developments make it unlikely that this state of affairs will persist. The developments he mentions include: A The proposed creation of a Supreme Court for the United Kingdom A The resulting identification of the Supreme Court judges as public figures A The increased roles of the judge in reviewing legislation under the Humans Rights Act A The developments in review of administrative action A The new procedures for selecting and training judges and changes in the arrangements affecting the senior members of the Bar from whom the judges are chosen Justice Kirby suggests that the judges of the United Kingdom will not be immune from the debate over activism that affects judges in most parts of the world. This makes an examination of what is happening to the method in other countries with similar legal systems and traditions particularly timely.
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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 | 0.042 | 0.035 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.072 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.033 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.014 | 0.018 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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.
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".