Managing Charter Equality Rights: The Supreme Court of Canada’s Disposition of Leave to Appeal Applications in Section 15 Cases, 1989-2010
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Through a study of the Court’s disposition of 177 leave to appeal applications in section 15 cases since 1989, the authors examine the role of the Supreme Court of Canada in guiding the development of Charter equality rights jurisprudence. The data reveal that the grant rate on leave applications in section 15 cases has declined markedly since the late 1990s, reaching historic lows in the past five years. The grant rate in section 15 cases has declined more precipitously than the grant rate in Charter cases as a whole, even though section 15 jurisprudence remains in an unsettled and unsatisfactory state, and even though the Court continues to be presented with compelling applications for leave to appeal in section 15 cases. When the Court has granted leave in section 15 cases in recent years, it has dismissed section 15 claims perfunctorily in a majority of cases as other legal issues took centre stage. The data also reveal that the chances of being granted leave in section 15 cases, and of succeeding on appeal to the Supreme Court, are much higher for governments. The authors conclude that the Court has played a significant role, through its management of the appeal process, in directing a restricted scope for Charter equality rights.
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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 | 0.009 | 0.037 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".