Courting Constitutional Danger: Constitutional Conventions and the Legacy of the Patriation Reference
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The legacy of the Supreme Court’s decisions in the Patriation Reference and the Quebec Veto Reference is more political than jurisprudential. In particular, the Supreme Court’s decision on the justiciability of constitutional conventions has created a dangerous precedent whereby political actors attempt to manipulate the courts into influencing a particular political outcome. The election of May 2, 2011 presented precisely such a dangerous opportunity. This paper develops the concept of “constitutional danger”, the idea that certain actions may constitute threats to our constitutional order. It does so by linking the events of the springs of 1981 and 2011. The paper asserts that by answering the convention question and assuming the power to “recognize” constitutional conventions, the Supreme Court courted constitutional danger. The Supreme Court has developed practical ways of avoiding adjudicating such crises; however, the embers of future constitutional crises are still smouldering in the pages of the Patriation Reference.
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 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 | 0.013 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.059 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.014 |
| 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".