OPINION WRITING AND AUTHORSHIP ON THE SUPREME COURT OF CANADA
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In contrast to other branches of government, the Supreme Court of Canada operates with relatively lean staffing. For most of the Court’s history, its justices alone determined which cases to review, heard oral argument, and wrote opinions. Only since 1967 have justices have been aided in these responsibilities by law clerks. While interest abounds in the relationship between justices and their clerks – particularly the writing of opinions – very little is known. This article analyses the text of the Court’s opinions to better understand judicial authorship. We find that justices have distinct writing styles, allowing us to distinguish them from one another. Their writing styles also provide insight into how clerks influence the writing of opinions. Most justices in the modern era possess a more variable writing style than their predecessors did, both within and across years, providing strong evidence that clerks are increasingly involved in the writing of judicial opinions.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.044 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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".