OPINION WRITING AND AUTHORSHIP ON THE SUPREME COURT OF CANADA
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
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.
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.
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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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