The Contextual Turn: Iacobucci's Legacy and the Standard of Review in Administrative Law
Bibliographic record
Abstract
No judge of the Canadian Supreme Court in a generation can claim the same level of influence over the development of administrative law as Justice Frank Iacobucci. His influence is particularly visible in the context of the standard of review: the degree of scrutiny a court will employ in reviewing an administrative decision. The standard of review raises the dilemma of how courts may simultaneously respect the legislative choice to delegate certain executive decision making to expert bodies and ensure that such bodies respect the limits of their statutory authority and the broader constraints imposed by the rule of law. Courts have long been tempted to treat administrative boards and tribunals as inferior beings. Furthering the legacy of John Willis, Justice Iacobucci’s salient contribution has been to focus on the expertise of administrative agencies relative to the courts and to demand deference on the part of the courts.Here we explore unresolved tensions in the standard of review in Canadian jurisprudence and Justice Iacobucci’s efforts to piece the puzzle together. In response to the need for great contextual analysis, Justice Iacobucci developed a third standard of review (reasonableness simpliciter). In so doing, he embraced the challenge of complexity through attention to context. He was, however, reluctant to extend this contextual approach to its natural conclusion because of a concern that such a path may provide cover for courts to show less rather than more deference to administrative decisions. We argue, whilst appreciative of his reservation, that the Supreme Court now needs to complete the contextual turn that Justice Iacobucci adroitly instigated and navigated during his tenure on the Court.
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 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 | 0.003 | 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 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".