Canada (Attorney General) v. Bedford and the Limits on Substantive Criminal Law under Section 7
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Canada (Attorney General) v. Bedford, the Supreme Court struck down Canada’s prostitution laws on the basis that they violated prostitutes’ right to security of the person and were inconsistent with the principles of fundamental justice under section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This paper examines the implications of Bedford for the constitutional norms against arbitrary, overbroad and grossly disproportionate laws. It is argued that Bedford significantly advances the law on these principles of fundamental justice by clarifying the tests governing their application, by elucidating the ir inter-relationships, by distinguishing the constitutional analysis applicable under these principles from the section 1 proportionality analysis, and, most importantly, by demonstrating that the principles against arbitrariness, overbreadth and gross disproportionality remain alive and capable of meaningfully constraining legislative choice. The analysis also touches on the future regulation of prostitution in Canada, and suggests that the law as laid out in Bedford leaves Parliament with some room to choose between regulatory options. Specifically, it is argued that criminalizing prostitution may remain constitutionally permissible after Bedford.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".