Does No 'No' Mean Reasonable Doubt? Assessing the Impact of Ewanchuk on Determinations of Consent
Bibliographic record
Abstract
To the delight of the feminist community, the Supreme Court of Canada released its decision in the case of R. v. Ewanchuk in 1999, which clarified the defence of honest but mistaken belief in consent in sexual assault cases and emphatically rejected a defence of implied consent. Given predictions made by both supporters and opponents about the significance of Ewanchuk, the author explores how the decision has impacted on the resolution of sexual assault cases since its release. Ewanchuk has been most clearly and consistently applied in cases in which the complainant expressly communicated her lack of consent. In circumstances where the complainant was silent or her conduct was passive or ambiguous, judges have been less consistent in their application of Ewanchuk. Essentially, many judges erroneously determine consent on the basis of “no means no” rather than “only yes means yes.” Moreover, even where courts have properly applied Ewanchuk, stereotypical assumptions about women as complainants continue to inform their analysis of the facts and the applicable law.
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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 | 0.186 | 0.489 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.067 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.022 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.016 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.016 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".