Formal Equality in Law, Moral Regulation in Practice: Courts Versus Policy Makers as Champions of Sexuality and Reproductive Rights in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines laws and policies implemented in the wake of favorable post-1982 Supreme Court of Canada rulings related to sexuality and reproduction. It finds that while in many areas of law, women and sexual minorities have achieved formal legal equality because of favorable Charter rulings, underpinning many areas of law and public policy is a continued moral regulation of sexuality and reproduction that prevents the full realization of those equality rights. This article examines the content of judicial decisions as well as analysis of policy implementation (or lack thereof) in post-Charter rulings. It finds a disjuncture between the formal acknowledgement of rights and the continued morally regulatory policies and practices that exist through a number of means: as a result of lacunae in existing law and regulations; as a result of being expressly passed into legislation or regulations as exceptions (such as conscience clauses or refusal clauses for pharmacists); or as a result of legislative refusal to provide funding for services. In other words, equality is really what government makes of it post-judicial review. The article points to an important research agenda on compliance that moves beyond analysis of formal responses post-judicial review to consider a broader range of regulative practices.
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 | 0.009 | 0.027 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".