Bibliographic record
Abstract
Two hundred years after its most famous invocation in Marbury v. Madison,2 judicial review has apparently lost its luster.Despite its global spread, it is in disrepute in its country of origin.The mainstream American academic attitude toward judicial review as practiced by the modem Supreme Court ranges from open hostility to a position similar to Winston Churchill's on democracy: It is the worst way to implement a Constitution, except for all the rest.In this essay, I want to explain the source of the hostility, defend judicial review against its critics, and make a few suggestions for improvement.First a word on what I mean by judicial review.In some versions, judicial review describes only a limited power to interpret a constitution or other guiding document, but no binding authority.In Canada and the United Kingdom, for example, the courts can declare a statute inconsistent withrespectivelythe Canadian Constitution or the European Convention on Human Rights, but cannot enforce that declaration.The offending statute either remains effective until repealed by the legislature or can be made effective by re-enactment.3 I will focus instead on the modem American form of judicial review, under which judicial declarations interpreting the Constitution are binding on all other governmental actors.The judiciary has the final word in the sense that if it declares a statute unconstitutional, the statute is ineffective and unenforceable, even if it remains on the books.We should note, of course, that the judiciary's decision is not final if it decides that a particular course of action is consistent with the Constitution.In that case, other governmental actors can still exercise independent judgment and decline to follow the course of action if they believe that it is unconstitutional or even simply unwise.To speak of judicial supremacy then, is a bit misleading.The judiciary is no more supreme than any other 1.Cal
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 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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".