Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Canada (A.G.) v. Bedford, the Supreme Court of Canada invalidated three prostitution-related provisions of the Criminal Code on grounds of overbreadth and gross disproportionality. The implications of Bedford go well beyond the particular context of sex work and even of criminal law. First, the Court held that the three constitutional norms against overbreadth, arbitrariness, and gross disproportionality are distinct from each other rather than aspects of a single norm against overbreadth. Second, the Court held that a Charter applicant could establish a violation of section 7 by showing that a law is overbroad, arbitrary, or grossly disproportionate in its impact on the life, liberty, or security of only one person and that the effectiveness of the law in achieving its policy objectives was not relevant to these norms. There are some difficulties in understanding this highly individualistic approach to section 7, and those difficulties lead to the third implication. By deferring any consideration of the effectiveness of the law to the question of whether it is a proportional limit on a section 7 right, the Court may be indicating a willingness to do something it has never done before: recognize an infringement of a section 7 right as a justified limit under section 1. The Court’s clarification of the relationship between the norms against overbreadth, arbitrariness, and gross disproportionality is welcome, but its individualistic articulation of those norms is difficult to understand and its suggestion that section 7 violations may now be easier to save under section 1 is troubling.
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 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 | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.018 | 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 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".