Chthonic Legal Traditions towards Emic Understandings of Australian First Nations Constitutionalism: 'Rooted' Constitutionalism and a Foundational Conceptual Apparatus for Inquiries into Australian First Nations Legal Orders
Bibliographic record
Abstract
First Nations constitutionalism unfolds within a chthonic legal tradition which is incommensurable with most of the positivist theoretical and conceptual models deployed to investigate Westphalian constitutional systems. The irreducibility of analysis of chthonic constitutional traditions with such models of constitutionalism calls, on the one hand, for rethinking positivistic approaches to legal reasoning and rationalisation and, on the other hand, for identifying new conceptual grids in charting the normative and legal landscape of Indigenous constitutionalism. With specific reference to Australian First Nations constitutionalism, the purpose of this paper is to suggest the adoption of a conceptual apparatus for its investigation which reflects 'emic' understandings of what Indigenous legal orders are and how they operate. In doing so, the paper subsumes Australian First Nations constitutionalism into Mills’s theoretical elaboration of ‘rooted constitutionalism’ and argues that such a ‘rooted’ kind of constitutionalism needs to be expounded through foundational concepts such as nomos, myths, and legal traditions which are experientially and culturally grounded in the lifeworld that sustain Australian First Nations constitutional traditions. Such a conceptual apparatus draws mainly from the theoretical framework elaborated by legal pluralism and legal theory to deal with the contemporary normative complexities of stateless legal orders. It is a macro-level conceptual apparatus that would be foundational to ‘etic’ understanding and theorisation of First Nations Australian constitutionalism.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".