Seeking More Than Truth: A Rationalization of the Principled Exception to the Hearsay Rule
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canadian treatment of hearsay evidence has changed significantly in the preceding 20 years. Since 1990, the Supreme Court of Canada has adopted a more flexible approach to hearsay evidence through the development of the "principled exception." In this article, the author examines the purpose of evidence law and trial procedure from three different perspectives: as a tempered "truth-seeking" process, as a medium to communicate the acceptability of verdicts, and as a tool to regulate the epistemic and ethical conduct of decision-makers. He suggests that these three purposes are complementary and examines the principled exception to the hearsay rule using this pluralist approach. Overall, the author concludes that while the principled exception is primarily directed at promoting "truth-seeking," the necessity criterion and the current procedural format are also designed to enhance the communicative role of the trial process and to assist in the deliberation by the adjudicator. As such, the principled approach has been designed to seek more than the "truth."
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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".