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."
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.049 | 0.062 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.069 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.014 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".