What’s Law Good For?: An Empirical Overview of Charter Equality Rights Decisions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The authors present an empirical review of courts’ dispositions of legal challenges to government laws or policies based on alleged violations of the equality rights in section 15 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. They tabulated the results of all Supreme Court of Canada rulings, and over 300 lower court rulings, disposing of section 15 claims during the past 15 years. They found that, throughout the 15-year period, equality claims had a significantly lower chance of success compared to the success rate of Charter claims generally at the Supreme Court of Canada. The success rate of equality claims has increased slightly over time, casting some doubt on the view that the Law v. Canada (1999) ruling made equality claims even more difficult to establish than was the case in the decade following Andrews v. Law Society of British Columbia (1989). A close examination of the pattern of recent Supreme Court section 15 decisions reveals that the Court has not consistently adhered to its stated preference for substantive over formal equality. The authors argue that adjustments are necessary to prevent the “correspondence factor” set out in Law from becoming the vehicle through which the limited understanding of equality embodied in the “similarly situated test” re-emerges as dominant in the jurisprudence.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".