Ten Years After Ewanchuk The Art of Seduction is Alive And Well: An Examination of The Mistaken Belief in Consent Defence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It has been a decade since the Supreme Court of Canada released its controversial decision in R. v. Ewanchuk. One of the central doctrinal issues raised by critics of Ewanchuk was a concern that it would not sufficiently allow for the mistaken belief defence in cases involving ‘morally innocent’ accused engaged in typical sexual overtures or in cases where the accused and complainant were in an ongoing sexual relationship at the time of the offence. A review of the reported cases, since 1998, demonstrates that the Ewanchuk analysis, properly interpreted, does not unjustly criminalize the progression of intimate behavior between genuinely consenting adults. Less promisingly, the post-Ewanchuk case law also suggests that in circumstances involving intimate partners or spouses, trial judges may be more likely to wrongly rely on the assumption that as between spouses the doctrine of implied consent still exists. Ewanchuk, it seems, has achieved better respect from the law for the sexual integrity of the intoxicated party-goer. The trial decisions discussed in the last section of this paper suggest Ewanchuk has been less able to achieve this with respect to the sexual integrity of wives and girlfriends.
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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 | 0.012 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.038 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.017 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.013 | 0.016 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 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".