Hierarchy

Hierarchical Specificity in Legal Information Retrieval

The following is a basic concept of Hierarchical Specificity in relation to information retrieval. In addition to this, Hierarchical Specificity may be applied to legal texts, including case law, legislation and scholarly works. This type of specificity has nothing to do with the specificity relationship between the meaning of a term and the message, text, or documentary unit to which it refers. Instead it relates to the relative narrowness or breadth of the meaning of a term in a hierarchy. Weinberg and Cunningham (1984, 1985) used this definition in comparisons with operational specificity. Thus this hierarchical term-term relationship is entirely different from the term-document relationship that forms the basis of the semantic term-document relational definition of specificity as used in this encyclopedia.

Hierarchy in Legal Information Retrieval

The following is a basic concept of Hierarchy in relation to information retrieval. In addition to this, Hierarchy may be applied to legal texts, including case law, legislation and scholarly works. From the Greek for hierarch or high priest, hierarchy is now used to indicate an array of terms or descriptors or categories arranged from broader to narrower. There is a strong theoretical proposition that broader-narrower relationships exist only within facets (Kwasnik 1999).

International Hierarchy

Hierarchy as a Relation of Authority

G. John Ikenberry in his 2011 book “Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis and Transformation of the American World Order” wrotes:

“In the case of the American post-war order . . . there are several features that . . . give it a more consensual and agreed-upon character than imperial systems. One is the sponsorship and support of a loose system of rules and institutions that it has itself operated within. Another is its leadership in the provision of public goods – including security and maintenance of an open economic system. As an open system organized around leading liberal democratic states, states that operated within it have opportunities to consult, bargain, and negotiate with the United States. In effect, subordinate states have access to decision making at the center. Institutions for joint or concerted leadership span the liberal hegemonic landscape. These features of the American-led order do not eliminate hierarchy or the exercise of power, but they mute the imperial form of hierarchy and infuse it with liberal characteristics.” (p. 26)

Absolute independence and absolute empire

Because the history of systems of states so reveals, Adam Watson argues that the ideal-types of absolute independence (i.e., sovereign equality under anarchy) and absolute empire are not stable. Watson’s spectrum is made up of five general categories: anarchy, hegemony, suzerainty, dominion, and empire. Watson thus uses the metaphor of the pendulum to illustrate the movement between these five systems:

“The further the pendulum swung up the arc, either towards independent states or towards empire, the greater was the gravitational pull towards the centre, between hegemony and dominion. Sometimes the momentum of the pendulum carried it across the midpoint towards the other end of the spectrum. . . . The gravitational pull is a metaphor for what in sociological terms are the constraints exercised by the impersonal net of interests and pressures that hold the system together: constraints which become greater as a system moves towards the extremes of independences or empire. But the pendulum metaphor must be used with caution; there was no regularity in time or rhythm of the swing.” (p. 122)

Anarchy and hierarchy

Gerry Simpson wrote “Great Powers and Outlaw States” were hierarchy “signifies the presence of formal status differentiation among the actors within a decentralized system of authority and law (i.e., constitutional or legal hierarchies . . . situated within an anarchical order”) (p. 64). Great powers, for him, are differentiated “on the basis of their moral or political qualities” (p. 64), among other differences. And “Legalised Hegemony”, in his book, represents “the existence within an international society of a powerful elite of states whose superior status is recognized by minor powers as a political fact giving rise to the existence of certain constitutional privileges, rights and duties and whose relations with each other are defined by adherence to a rough principle of sovereign equality” (p. 68).

Resources

See Also

Further Reading

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