In Search of the Holy Grail of Environmental Law: A Rule to Solve the Problem
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There is widespread resistance to the use of generally applicable rules in environmental law. Such rules are thought impossible; and if not impossible, then certainly undesirable. This consensus is one of the main obstacles to progress in ecosystem protection, as it prevents environmental law from becoming a rigorous, coherent, predictable discipline, and from being able to stem the tide of ecological deterioration. Modern environmental law consists of nebulous, discretionary concepts and lists of narrow prohibitions for specific situations. Neither is based upon an abstract definition of sustainability in ecological terms. Consequently, the size of the human footprint upon ecosystems continues to grow. If environmental matters were to be governed by a single, generally applicable rule, what would it say? In this article, the author develops a rule that defines an environmental bottom line and respects established legal norms. The first step identifies an ecological limit for society as a whole. The second articulates a rule that proscribes individual behaviour, such that the combined impact of all individual actions would be within the limit identified in the first step.
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 | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".