Between Principle and Pragmatism: The Decline of Principled Reasoning in the Jurisprudence of the McLachlin Court
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper explains what principled reasoning is, and how it can be used to ensure judicial impartiality.It does so by analyzing and criticizing the reasoning of recent jurisprudence of the Supreme Court of Canada during the tenure of Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin, including recent cases such as Sauve v. Canada (Chief Electoral Officer), Alberta v. Hjutterian Brethren of Wilson Colony, R. v. Orbanski, R. v. Elias, and R. v. Clayton. The theoretical portion of the paper draws on the theories of judgment of Immanuel Kant, Hannah Arendt, Jurgen Habermas, Ronald Dworkin and Emmanuel Levinas. The main theoretical argument of the paper is that the use of principled reasoning is essential for ensuring judicial impartiality. When courts engage in such reasoning, they show that they have taken into account the views of all those affected by a decision, and they are forced to criticize their own biases and assumptions by the requirement to formulate their arguments in terms that are acceptable in the public forum. Also, by practicing principled judgment, courts develop the habit of judging impartially by taking into account the diverse perspectives of the community.
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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 | 0.049 | 0.073 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.115 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.020 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.028 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".