The Constitutional Inheritance of the Royal Baby: A Speculation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It might be thought that there would be little need for a post on this blog about the arrival of the royal baby.The new Prince of Cambridge -Your Highness, to his friends -is unlikely to play a significant constitutional role for sometime to come.I found myself wondering, though, what the constitutional situation will be when, and if, he finally comes to the throne.So, here is the post I plan to write in 2075 -and the way academic pensions are going, I will probably still be working then.To some, it may come as a surprise that Britain continues to be a monarchy.We escaped, or missed, the tide of republican constitutional reform that followed the death of Queen Elizabeth in the middle third of the century.Australia and Jamaica were the first to go, followed, like a line of falling dominos, by Canada, and then by New Zealand.Other territories followed suit, with most adopting an elected head of state or -more simply still -combing the role of head of state with that of prime minister.However, it is still the case that the sun never fully sets on our new King's realms: some small territories decided, for economic and foreign policy reasons, to retain the royal connection.And the Privy Council, acting as their highest court, still provides a useful guarantee of legal certainty to the owners of the many corporations nominally residing on these islands.Like these micro-realms, we in the United Kingdom have retained our monarchy.This is only partly through choice: the moment has never seemed quite right for a public discussion of the wider issues raised by an hereditary head of state, there always seems to have been more important matters to worry about.It could well be said that it is apathy, rather than a commitment to royalism, than has allowed the institution to last this long.Within the United Kingdom, the King inherits a fractious and diverse realm.Scotland will undertake its 10 th vote on independence from the Union this coming autumn, and the low-levels of likely voter turn out make it hard to predict the outcome.For many years, the royal family has worked hard to maintain the Union -without, of course, ever stating this position publically -and conferral of the title of 'Duke of Edinburgh' on the heir apparent reflects this commitment.A popular argument in favour of the monarchy is that it serves this unifying function, bringing the United Kingdom together.However, it has been hard to avoid the impression in the last fifty years or so that the royal family is tied to England, and based in London.The former monarch regularly attended the openings of the English Parliament and, of course, of our federal, British, Parliament, but was less commonly seen in the Scottish and Welsh Parliaments.Whilst the nationalist movement in Scotland remains formally committed to the monarchy, it is hard to believe this commitment is very deep.Ifor, perhaps, when -Scotland finally votes for independence, it is likely to reassess its connection with royalty.
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 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".