Taking purposes seriously: The purposive scope and textual bounds of interpretation under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In order for judicial review under the Constitution to be compatible with the rule of law, there must be some tangible constraints on judicial discretion. The author puts forward an account of interpretation under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms that views both the text and purposes underlying it as meaningful constraints on the range of meanings available to interpreters. In particular, the author seeks to demonstrate that purposivism as a method of interpretation can, and frequently has in the Canadian context, operated to narrow the scope of vague and under-determinate constitutional guarantees. The author criticizes more expansive forms of purposivism, which seek not only to inform the meaning of the words included in the Charter but also to give those purposes said to animate the guarantees independent legal force. This point is illustrated with particular reference to the Supreme Court of Canada’s right to vote jurisprudence. The author concludes that these more aggressive approaches to purposivism risk elevating judicially ascertained purposes to the same legal status as the language enacted into law and undermine the defence frequently offered in support of the legitimacy of judicial review under the Charter – that it stems from the deliberate choices of the people.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".