Alternative forms of judicial review

The invention in the late twentieth century of what I call weak-form systems of judicial review provides us with the chance to see in a new light some traditional debates within U.S. constitutional law and theory, which are predicated on the fact that the United States has strong-form judicial review. Strong- and weak-form systems operate on the level of constitutional design, in the sense that their characteristics are specified in constitutional documents or in deep-rooted constitutional traditions. After sketching the differences between strong- and weak-form systems, I turn to design features that operate at the next lower level. Here legislatures or courts specify whether their enactments or decisions will receive strong- or weak-form treatment. I examine examples of legislative allocations of issues to strong- and weak-form review and identify some practical and conceptual problems with such allocations. Then I examine judicial allocations — of the courts’ own decisions — to Strong- or weak-form categories. Here I consider Thayerian judicial review and what Professor Dan Coenen has called semisubstantive doctrines as examples of judicial choices to give their decisions weak-form effects. My conclusion is that these allocation strategies reproduce within strong- and weakform systems the issues that arise on the level of constitutional design. Weak-form systems and allocation may seem to alleviate some difficultiesassociated with strong-form systems in constitutional democracies. My analysis suggests that those difficulties may persist even when alternatives to strong-form judicial review are adopted.

Mandatory pre-enactment review of legislation; or should only one government branch be responsible for the protection of rights in the United States?

<p>This paper focuses on pre-enactment review of legislation as a constitutional tool for the protection of recognised rights. The paper first makes the distinction between strong- and weak-form judicial review, in order to analyse how pre-enactment review can be practiced within each constitutional model. Two countries are first looked at to illustrate the two models: the United States for strong-form review, and New Zealand for weak-form review. The absence of any formal pre-enactment review in the United States is noted, and evaluated through a more in-depth assessment of congressional practice. This observation leads to the main proposal of the paper: that pre-enactment review should be made mandatory in the United States. A comparative assessment is then made in order to discuss the proposal. The relevant constitutional practices in Australia, Canada and Japan are outlined. These comparative assessments are used to further delineate the appropriate form that mandatory pre-enactment review of legislation could take in the United States.</p>

Mandatory pre-enactment review of legislation; or should only one government branch be responsible for the protection of rights in the United States?

<p>This paper focuses on pre-enactment review of legislation as a constitutional tool for the protection of recognised rights. The paper first makes the distinction between strong- and weak-form judicial review, in order to analyse how pre-enactment review can be practiced within each constitutional model. Two countries are first looked at to illustrate the two models: the United States for strong-form review, and New Zealand for weak-form review. The absence of any formal pre-enactment review in the United States is noted, and evaluated through a more in-depth assessment of congressional practice. This observation leads to the main proposal of the paper: that pre-enactment review should be made mandatory in the United States. A comparative assessment is then made in order to discuss the proposal. The relevant constitutional practices in Australia, Canada and Japan are outlined. These comparative assessments are used to further delineate the appropriate form that mandatory pre-enactment review of legislation could take in the United States.</p>

Instrumentalization as a Sin of Untruth

The reconstructions, analyses and discussions concerning various broadly understood instrumentalized objects available in the subject literature allow one to distinguish and identify at least two interrelated forms of instrumentalization – a weak and a strong form. The former consists of using a particular object for fulfilling an aim in its unspecific functions. Thus, it can be treated as opposite to the phenomenon of functional fixation. The essence of the latter is a change in the position of the instrumentalized object, both in the ontological and axiological order – one which is a degrading change. It is this form of instrumentalization which allows the possibility of its reinterpretation in the categories of a sin of untruth. Such reinterpretation makes use of the multitude of forms of truth and their interrelationships, as well as of the distinction between a “great and small truth.” Thus, the heuristic value of the rhetoric of sin used here enables one to emphasise some important factual aspects. Firstly, referring to many possible dimensions in which instrumentalization can be subjected to evaluation, sin will be treated here metaphorically (due to taking into account all dimensions together) and literally (in order to highlight in consequence its moral, conscious and intended character). Secondly, this rhetoric can reflect the complex structure of instrumentalization, expressed in the categories of a sin committed “in thought, word, deed and omission,” of a light or heavy nature, with violation carried out on the nature of the instrumentalized object as its extreme form. Thirdly, rhetoric allows one to understand the perpetrator of instrumentalization’s activation of disguising, justifying or even absolving his activities. Fourthly, this results in seeking out the psychological mechanism of “being led into temptation.” Its complex character can be clearly seen in many cases, especially in the case of political instrumentalization of religion, where, on the one hand, the profanation of religion takes place, while on the other, the legitimisation, ennoblement or even sacralisation of politics occurs.

Soft ωp-Open Sets and Soft ωp-Continuity in Soft Topological Spaces

We define soft ωp-openness as a strong form of soft pre-openness. We prove that the class of soft ωp-open sets is closed under soft union and do not form a soft topology, in general. We prove that soft ωp-open sets which are countable are soft open sets, and we prove that soft pre-open sets which are soft ω-open sets are soft ωp-open sets. In addition, we give a decomposition of soft ωp-open sets in terms of soft open sets and soft ω-dense sets. Moreover, we study the correspondence between the soft topology soft ωp-open sets in a soft topological space and its generated topological spaces, and vice versa. In addition to these, we define soft ωp-continuous functions as a new class of soft mappings which lies strictly between the classes of soft continuous functions and soft pre-continuous functions. We introduce several characterizations for soft pre-continuity and soft ωp-continuity. Finally, we study several relationships related to soft ωp-continuity.

Pronominalization and Expectations for Re-Mention: Modeling Coreference in Contexts With Three Referents

The relationship between pronoun production and pronoun interpretation has been proposed to follow Bayesian principles, combining a comprehender’s expectation about which referent will be mentioned next and their estimate of how likely it is that a potential referent will be re-mentioned using a pronoun. The Bayesian Model has received support from studies in several languages (English, Mandarin Chinese, Catalan, German), but tested contexts have been limited to two event participants, whereas natural language discourse often involves contexts with more than two event participants. In this study, we conducted three story continuation experiments to assess how the Bayesian Model performs in more complex contexts. Our results show that even in contexts with three event participants, comprehenders can behave rationally when interpreting pronouns, but that they appear to require sufficient context to build up a coherent representation of the situation to do so. In addition to testing the basic claim of the Bayesian Model (Weak Bayes), we test the central prediction of the Strong form of the hypothesis: that the two components of the model (next-mention expectations and choice of referring expression) are influenced by dissociated sets of factors. In a model comparison, Experiments 2 and 3 confirm the closest fit from the Bayesian Model, which supports Weak Bayes, and none of our experiments find evidence that the predictability of a referent affects pronominalization rates, which corroborates Strong Bayes. Finally, we test whether the rate of pronominalization is sensitive to factors related to ambiguity and argument/adjunct status of referents; we find that participants vary their production of pronouns most strongly based on the grammatical role of the antecedent (subject or not), with a smaller effect from the presence/absence of a gender-matched competitor and no effect from the syntactic position of this competing referent.

A Strong-Form Off-Lattice Boltzmann Method for Irregular Point Clouds

Radial basis function generated finite differences (RBF-FD) represent the latest discretization approach for solving partial differential equations. Their benefits include high geometric flexibility, simple implementation, and opportunity for large-scale parallel computing. Compared to other meshfree methods, typically based upon moving least squares (MLS), the RBF-FD method is able to recover a high order of algebraic accuracy while remaining better conditioned. These features make RBF-FD a promising candidate for kinetic-based fluid simulations such as lattice Boltzmann methods (LB). Pursuant to this approach, we propose a characteristic-based off-lattice Boltzmann method (OLBM) using the strong form of the discrete Boltzmann equation and radial basis function generated finite differences (RBF-FD) for the approximation of spatial derivatives. Decoupling the discretizations of momentum and space enables the use of irregular point cloud, local refinement, and various symmetric velocity sets with higher order isotropy. The accuracy and computational efficiency of the proposed method are studied using the test cases of Taylor–Green vortex flow, lid-driven cavity, and periodic flow over a square array of cylinders. For scattered grids, we find the polyharmonic spline + poly RBF-FD method provides better accuracy compared to MLS. For Cartesian node layouts, the results are the opposite, with MLS offering better accuracy. Altogether, our results suggest that the RBF-FD paradigm can be applied successfully also for kinetic-based fluid simulation with lattice Boltzmann methods.