Electoral Fairness and the Law of Democracy: A Structural Rights Approach to Judicial Review
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Partisan self-dealing in the design of election laws is a central challenge for democratic governance. This article develops a new conceptual framework, which I call a structural rights approach, that would enable the Supreme Court of Canada to respond effectively to this problem. A structural rights approach uses the language and logic of individual rights to regulate the structure of democratic institutions. In particular, I argue that courts should design democratic rights to remedy the structural deficiencies of the political system. To this end, I claim that the Supreme Court should interpret the right to vote as encompassing a new democratic right – the right to a fair and legitimate democratic process. In addition, I argue that the right to a fair and legitimate democratic process is best understood as a ‘structural right.’ I define ‘structural rights’ as individual rights that take into account the broader institutional framework within which rights are defined, held, and exercised. This article focuses on two cases studies – electoral redistricting and campaign finance – to show how the Court could use the right to a fair and legitimate democratic process to remedy the problem of partisan self-dealing. In addition, this article canvasses a wide array of structural approaches in the Canadian and American law of democracy literatures, and it locates the structural rights approach within this body of scholarship. The article also considers the structural rights approach with reference to theories of dialogue and deference. The structural rights approach not only provides a new paradigm for the Supreme Court’s oversight of the democratic process; it also offers an alternative way to conceptualize democratic rights.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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 it