The Rule of Law and the Justiciability of Prerogative Powers: A Comment on Black V. Chrétien
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Black v. Chretien, the Ontario Court of Appeal addressed the issue of the courts' ability to review the exercise of Crown prerogative powers. While the court held that the exercise of prerogative powers is subject to judicial review in general, it stipulated that certain categories of prerogative powers are not reviewable. The court reasoned that judicial review is limited to instances where the nature and subject matter of the prerogative powers are amenable to the judicial process. In Conrad Black's lawsuit against the prime minister, the court found that the communication between the prime minister and the Queen represented an exercise of the prerogative to grant honours and that such a prerogative was non-justiciable. The author is critical of the court's use of the doctrine of justiciability to shield executive officials from judicial review. He argues that the court adopted an undesirably formalistic approach to justiciability, with the consequence that a significant sphere of executive action lies beyond the reach of the rule of law. The author maintains that justiciability should solely depend on the legitimacy and capacity of the courts to adjudicate a matter. In his opinion, Black's claim against the prime minister was justiciable.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.050 | 0.034 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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.
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".