Judicial Appointment, Democratic Aspiration and the Culture of Accountability
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When Ivan Rand was appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada in 1943, the country knew little about him, his suitability for the position, or the Supreme Court on which he was about to play such a pivotal and transformative role. In 1959, as the author of the most significant set of reasons in the Supreme Court's Roncarelli v. Duplessis, Rand J. set the stage for a constitutional culture organized around constraining the executive branch from unfettered authority. Roncarelli stood, and stands, for the proposition that no executive authority in Canada is unlimited. The Canadian Bill of Rights, the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms, and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which followed in Roncarelli's wake, extended that culture of constraint to cover all governmental authority (including legislative authority). Roncarelli, therefore, reflects the “Rand Paradox.” The judge most credited with subjecting executive authority to the rule of law was himself appointed to the Supreme Court in an exercise of unchecked and unreviewable executive authority -- that is, the authority of the federal executive to appoint judges to the Supreme Court, and to all federally appointed trial and appellate courts. The rule of law in Canada, in other words, is supervised by judges appointed according to a process that effectively lies beyond the reach of the rule of law.The analysis below is divided into two parts. First, I chart the evolution of judicial appointments in Canada and the implications of recent efforts at reform. Then, I discuss how the legal culture surrounding judicial independence and the political culture surrounding transparency and accountability are likely to drive further reforms in judicial appointments. The result, I believe somewhat optimistically, will be both to constrain the executive in its exercise of the appointment power, and to enhance the role of the judge in Canadian democracy.
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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 | 0.015 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.063 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| 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".