Dissents and Concurrences: Seven Debates in Charter Jurisprudence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Supreme Court of Canada released seven Charter decisions in 2012 that were not unanimous. When compared to the non-Charter cases released the same year, the Charter dissents represented a higher rate of disagreement between the justices. This should not come as a surprise. The Charter is an open-textured instrument that admits of flexibility and growth. Dissents and differing approaches are expected as Charter jurisprudence continues to develop. This paper argues that the seven Charter dissents/concurrences released in 2012 provide a rich illustration of the various functions of dissenting opinions. As articulated by Justice L’Heureux-Dubé, these are: to prophesize, to stir dialogue, and to safeguard the integrity of the law and judicial institutions. Each of these functions takes on a special dimension in the realm of Charter jurisprudence. In their prophetic function, dissents are intimately connected to the doctrine of the living tree — recognizing, as it does, that there will be a future audience of constitutional opinions that will not necessarily share the constraints of our more dated institutions. The dialogic function of dissents, likewise, takes on additional significance in this context. Charter dissents are a fundamental part of the forward-looking conversation between courts and society, giving the m the potential to shape, over the long term, the societal values they engage. Finally, dissents in Charter cases essentially promote the integrity of our judicial institutions. The “fierce independence” of the justices on constitutional matters necessitates real opportunities to dissent.
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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 | 0.039 | 0.048 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.044 | 0.042 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.017 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".