The Court's Mulligan: a commennt on Canada (attorney general) v. Hislop
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in Canada (Attorney General) v. Hislopreveals a significant disagreement over the nature of judicial precedents and the attendant costs of deviating from them. In the context of devising a test for remedial retroactivity, a majority of the Court rules that a “substantial change in law,” even one short of overruling a precedent, can lead to a purely prospective remedy. In this view, the Court’s reasoning in any particular case should be applied as broadly as possible and understood as modifying any existing precedents to the contrary. In dissent, Justice Michel Bastarache accuses his colleagues of conflating a change in judicial interpretation with a change in the Constitution itself. At the root of the disagreement between Bastarache and the rest of the Court are differing conceptions of the Court’s role in policy making. While Bastarache prefers a more traditional adjudicatory role, the majority’s more policy-centric approach calls for increased flexibility and lower costs when the Court chooses to abandon precedents made in error.
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".