Bibliographic record
Abstract
A federal system has to have a rule to resolve conflicts between federal (national) laws and provincial (state) laws. Oddly enough, the need for such a rule escaped the framers of the British North America Act in 1867, and they made no provision for conflicts between federal and provincial laws. It was left to the courts to invent the rule, and they decided that, in case of conflict between a federal and provincial law, the federal law is paramount. Obviously, the doctrine of paramountcy means that the provincial law must yield to the federal law to the extent of the conflict. But what exactly is the status of the provincial law? The answer is that the provincial law is not rendered invalid or ultra vires; nor is it repealed; it is rendered “inoperative”. The difference between “inoperative” and the alternatives is that the operation of the provincial law is suspended for as long as the conflicting federal law remains in force; if the federal law is repealed, the provincial law will automatically revive (come back into operation) without any reenactment by the provincial legislature. It is the meaning of conflict or inconsistency (I treat these two terms as synonymous) that has proved most troublesome, and is the topic of this paper. It is worth noting at the outset that the definition of conflict carries profound implications for the scope of federal review and for the balance of legislative power within the federation. Given the overriding force of federal law, a wide definition of conflict will result in the defeat of provincial laws in “fields” that are “covered” by federal law. This is the course of judicial activism, because it leads to the striking down of provincial laws. In that sense, it favours central power. A narrow
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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.003 |
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".