THE CHARTER REVOLUTION: IS IT UNDEMOCRATIC?
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A new book on the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms by two professors from the University of Calgary, F.L. Morton and Rainer Knopff, is entitled The Charter Revolution and the Court Party.1 By the “Charter revolution” the authors refer to the active law- making role assumed by the Supreme Court of Canada since the adoption of the Charter of Rights in 1982.2 By the “Court Party” they refer to a cluster of interest groups promoting Charter rights through litigation.3 The thesis of the book is that these groups have been successful in obtaining changes in the law from the Supreme Court of Canada that could not have been achieved in the representative legislative assemblies. That, they argue, is wrong because it is “undemocratic.”4 I agree that there has been a Charter revolution. I also agree that there is a Court Party, but I will argue that the cluster of interest groups using litigation as their strategy is much broader than the authors acknowledge. I also agree that the effects of these two phenomena have not been wholly beneficial, but I argue that, on the whole, the result is one that enhances rather than usurps a democratic dialogue.
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.
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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
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 it