Comparative Law at the Supreme Court of Canada in 2008: Limited Engagement and Missed Opportunities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the use of comparative law by the Supreme Court of Canada in its 2008 constitutional cases. For all the rhetoric surrounding the Supreme Court as a global constitutional actor, the Supreme Court’s use of comparative law in the 2008 Term was quite modest. of the 12 constitutional cases in 2008, three used comparative law. The Court’s use of comparative constitutional law in 2008 can be described in terms of limited engagement and missed opportunities. In this paper, the author explains why we should be interested in the Supreme Court’s use of comparative law. He the n examines the actual use of comparative law in the companion cases of R. v. Kang-Brown and R. v. M. (A.), as well as the anomalous use of comparative law in Canada (Justice) v. Khadr. The author the n critiques the non-use of comparative law in R. v. Kapp, the Court’s most important equality decision in a decade. The author concludes with words of caution about the future of the Supreme Court of Canada’s international influence and a note of optimism about the possibilities for future comparative engagement.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".