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Record W1522895673

Common Law Police Powers and the Rule of Law

2007· article· en· W1522895673 on OpenAlexaffabout
Steve Coughlan

Bibliographic record

VenueeYLS (Yale Law School) · 2007
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicCriminal Law and Evidence
Canadian institutionsDalhousie University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsDoctrineLawSupreme courtPredictabilityCommon lawPolitical scienceCriminal lawLaw and economicsSociology
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Common law police powers have long been a source of some dispute in the Canadian criminal justice system. On the one hand, their existence is difficult to reconcile with predictability in the law, since in any individual case where a new power is created (generally referred to as use of the "ancillary powers doctrine"), it would not have been possible to know in advance that the police were actually acting legally. On the other hand the benefit for society purchased with that ambiguity is a more tailored response to the particular problem, which might also lead to better results in future cases. One can reasonably fall into a variety of places on the scale defined by the values of predictability and protection of society.\nRecently, however, two trends can be observed in the use of common law police powers. Where at one point they were a rarity, and perhaps only served as a safety valve, more frequently today courts seems to regard the use of the ancillary powers doctrine as one of the tools always brought to the table. That trend reflects a movement toward the tailoring end and away from the predictability end of the spectrum.\nThe second trend is more worrying. This trend reflects not merely a greater willingness to tailor the law for particular fact patterns, but a change in exactly what it means for the police to have a common law police power. In essence, the Supreme Court seems to have begun to interpret the ancillary powers doctrine in a way which ceases to think of the police as having actual "powers" at all, but rather as whether we should retroactively approve or disapprove of the decision made on the spot by the individual officer. If a court approves, the power existed: if a court did not approve, the power did not exist. Ultimately that approach would challenge foundational notions of our criminal justice system, because it will amount to rule by people, not by law.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.954
Threshold uncertainty score0.848

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.002
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.023
GPT teacher head0.314
Teacher spread0.291 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations3
Published2007
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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