This chapter explores and develops the relationship between two key concepts that have been central to Gary Jacobsohn’s work over the past decade or so: constitutional identity and constitutional revolution. In particular, it addresses the issues of (1) how and to what extent constitutional revolutions impact constitutional identity, (2) whether they do so in a single or uniform way, and (3) the implications of the broadening of the concept of constitutional revolution in the recent book for the possibility of the “substitution of one constitutional identity for another.” With respect to the latter, the chapter identifies a certain resistance in the new book to the idea of a new constitutional identity but argues both that its thesis is perfectly consistent with this possibility and that the idea provides the best way to understand certain constitutional revolutions.

Many Australian academics and jurists regard Australian High Court Chief Justice Sir Owen Dixon’s judgment in Parker v The Queen (1963) as Australia’s ‘declaration of judicial independence’ from Privy Council precedent and from a unified common law more generally. His expression in Parker is sharp, clear; Dixon makes no apologies for his finding. Nor does he limit the decision to its facts: he states, quite clearly, that he believes that the Australian courts should no longer be beholden to English precedent. Further, he states that has the support of the puisne justices in making this declaration. How had the Court arrived at this point, particularly in the context of its members championing ‘interdependence’ with British institutions, and close adherence to legal precedent, only years earlier? The reasons for this volte-face on the part of both Dixon and his colleagues remain unexplored in Australian legal history. This paper reveals that, notwithstanding the justices’ continuing cultural ties to Britain, their changing views as to the desirability of judicial interdependence were largely a reaction to developments in the English judiciary itself. This chapter argues that the justices’ changing conception of the role of the Australian High Court was shaped in part by a growing sense of a uniquely Australian legal identity, but more pressingly as a reaction to disappointment with the Privy Council in particular. It explores the reasons for this disappointment and suggests that Dixon’s own jurisprudence presaged the Australian Federal Parliament’s actions in the decades that followed to abolish appeals to the Privy Council.

There is an emerging body of legal thought directed at contemporary profiling and data science. Some of this focuses on limiting ‘human computability’, some addresses questions of ‘manipulation’ and ‘behavioural optimisation’, and some suggests ways to introduce friction into the information environment to interrupt the translation of data into meaning. This chapter looks at how some of these ideas might be implemented as computational legal applications. It argues that the legal subject of algorithmic accountability can be expanded into a rights-bearing entity that can actively contest how it is computationally interpreted, through mechanisms of ‘contestation by design’. The chapter also describes the utility of concepts like ‘context’ for building boundaries and friction into information architectures, not simply in terms of information flow but also for constraining how the design of those architectures influences and structures behaviour. Finally, it suggests the shape of a new ‘composite’ legal person as a mechanism to constrain profiling behavior by producing an identity as an interface to the ‘world state’ it inhabits.