Introduction to: The Dignity of Law: The Legacy of Justice Louis LeBel
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This piece is the introduction to a collection on the jurisprudential legacy of Justice Louis LeBel, offering both some general perspective on the figure at issue and the variety of essays within the collection. Justice Louis LeBel retired from the Supreme Court of Canada on November 30, 2014 after almost 15 years of distinguished service there, as well as 16 years on the Quebec Court of Appeal. Among lawyers and Court-watchers, he is widely thought to be one of the most intellectual and prolific judges in Canada. To the wider public, however, he is less well-known. For it is hard to reduce his legacy to a single label. As Justice LeBel himself has pointed out, many of the commonly used ideologically flavoured labels simply do not fit. But, as the essays in this volume amply demonstrate, this is not because of any lack of principle or coherence to Justice LeBel’s overarching vision. Rather, it is simply because his vision is a subtle one that cannot be captured in simplistic terms. A judge should be neither a political activist nor a mere mechanistic servant of the legislature. The role of a judge involves the application of laws — necessarily drafted in general terms — to specific cases through an exercise of judgment. That act of judgment is neither mechanistically determined by the text of the law nor radically open to interpretation according to the judge’s favoured ideology. It is in the act of judgment that the deep learning, understanding and humanitarian outlook of the judge can be seen. So the judge must be someone who respects both the dignity of law and the dignity of the act of judging. We hope some of these themes appear throughout the book. Indeed, we hope that, put end to end, the chapters in the book provide a picture of Justice LeBel's judicial legacy, not only in areas where matters of great principle are most obviously at stake, but also in areas traditionally thought of as more technical.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.005 |
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".