Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper studies Michel Bastarache’s judgments in family law, specifically those appeals concerning parents and children. These judgments reveal comfort with the complexity of contemporary family life, notably through reliance on multi-factored, contextual analysis. They also show a commitment to individualized family justice as determined by trial judges, as well as sensitivity to the duty to respect the design choices of the legislative drafter. Scholarly criticisms that the Supreme Court, in Justice Bastarache’s family decisions, abdicated a leadership role by deferring too much to trial judges misunderstand his vision of judging. Moreover, such criticisms rest on unexamined assumptions about the character of legitimate judicial guidance in the family field. Justice Bastarache’s family judgments can be read as setting out broad moral guidelines, exemplifying what some scholars identify as the expressive function of contemporary law. In his refusal to squeeze child support into a single conceptual framework, Justice Bastarache shows a Fullerian commitment to pursuing a legal regime’s complex purposes. He emerges from his family judgments as a pragmatic judge, conscious of the limited capacity of rules to regulate the unruliness of family life, and confident in the necessity of individualized adjudication.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot 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.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".