Women Lawyers before the Supreme Court of Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract. Recent work by Szmer, Sarver, and Kaheny (2010) exploring US Supreme Court decision making has suggested that lawyer gender might play a role in influencing judicial voting behaviour. Specifically, while women lawyers were not revealed to have a more difficult time winning cases before the US Supreme Court, the study did suggest they face a tougher challenge in gaining support from the more conservative justices on that bench. Here, we test whether women lawyers face similar challenges before the SCC. Our findings do not reveal any disadvantage for litigation teams with larger proportions of women and, in most instances, such teams have an advantage. Specifically, in our model of civil rights and liberties votes, litigation team gender had no bearing on individual SCC justice decisions. However, in a pooled model of all issues combined and in separate models of criminal and economic votes, SCC justices were more likely to side with litigation teams with larger proportions of women lawyers. Résumé. Une étude récente de Szmer, Sarver et Kaheny (2010) explore la manière dont la Cour suprême des États-Unis prend ses décisions, suggérant que le sexe des avocats pourrait avoir une influence sur le comportement décisionnel des juges. Plus spécifiquement, bien que les avocates n'aient pas plus de difficulté que leurs collègues masculins à gagner leurs procès à la Cour suprême des États-Unis, l'étude suggère que leur plus grand défi est d'obtenir le soutien des juges plus traditionnels de cette cour. Dans le présent article, nous cherchons à déterminer si les avocates canadiennes font face à un défi semblable à la Cour suprême du Canada. Les résultats de notre étude ne révèlent aucun désavantage pour les équipes d'avocats comprenant plus de femmes et dans la plupart des cas, ces équipes bénéficient même d'un avantage. Plus précisement, dans notre modèle décisionnel en matière de droits et libertés civiles, le sexe des membres des équipes d'avocats n'avait aucune incidence sur les décisions individuelles des juges de la Cour suprême du Canada. Cependant, dans un modèle commun réunissant tous les types de dossiers et dans des modèles séparés pour les décisions sur des dossiers criminels et financiers, les juges de la Cour suprême du Canada étaient plus enclins à prendre parti pour des équipes comportant une plus grande proportion d'avocates.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".