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Record W1594900901 · doi:10.60082/2563-8505.1140

Justice Bertha Wilson: A Classically Liberal Judge

2008· article· en· W1594900901 on OpenAlexaff
Kent Roach

Bibliographic record

VenueSupreme Court law review · 2008
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicCriminal Law and Evidence
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Toronto
Fundersnot available
KeywordsLiberalismEconomic JusticeClassical liberalismLawDissenting opinionSociologyState (computer science)Law and economicsFeminismPolitical scienceEpistemologyPhilosophyPolitics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

This paper argues that Justice Wilson’s approach to judging was influenced by a classical liberalism that defended the rights of the individual against the power of the state. The first part of the paper explores the concept of classical liberalism by examining Justice Wilson’s judgment in R. v. Morgentaler. Although this landmark judgment is influenced by feminism because Justice Wilson writes from the perspective of a woman, it is ultimately grounded in classical liberalism that protects the freedom of all individuals and requires the state to justify any incursion on individual freedom. The second part of the paper examines a number of procedural decisions made by Justice Wilson and suggests that they were grounded in a classical liberalism that stressed the obligations of the state to treat all individuals fairly and to give individuals the benefit of the doubt. The third part of the essay examines Justice Wilson’s approach to the substantive content of the criminal law. In decisions such as R. v. Tutton, Justice Wilson expressed a preference for subjective fault requirements that would encompass individuals in all their idiosyncrasies. at the same time, Justice Wilson respected clear decisions by Parliament to employ objective standards while attempting in cases such as R. v. Hill and R. v. Lavallee to apply objective standards in a manner that was fair to all. The fourth part of this paper examines how Justice Wilson’s classical liberalism informed her unflinching and rigorous approach to the Oakes standard of justification. Her approach was frequently a dissenting one, but it served as a pole star that helped ensure that the Court never lost sight of the fact that section 1 of the Charter required the state to justify why it was necessary to infringe rights. Justice Wilson’s approach to section 1 was ultimately grounded in liberal principles that stressed the importance of protecting all individuals from the state and it did not demonstrate any ambivalence about the potentially harmful powers of the state.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.005
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.018
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: Other
Teacher disagreement score0.967
Threshold uncertainty score0.065

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0050.018
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0110.019
Scholarly communication0.0090.007
Open science0.0010.003
Research integrity0.0100.012
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0030.001

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 head0.120
GPT teacher head0.370
Teacher spread0.250 · 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreOther

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

Citations0
Published2008
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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