Attitudes, Precedents and Cultural Change: Explaining the Citation of Foreign Precedents by the Supreme Court of Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Policy convergence theory suggests that political leaders of societies will often emulate policy solutions that work in other settings. Yet political leaders can also reject policy alternatives, leading to policy divergence. This study explores the extent to which policy convergence (and/or divergence) takes place in the legal setting of citation practices by the Supreme Court of Canada. The authors examine the Court's practice of citing authorities from other countries, particularly the United States. The findings echo earlier works that have found increasing citation of US case law since the adoption of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982. The justices of the Canadian Supreme Court continue to devote considerable attention to the legal doctrines of other countries' courts, particularly when they are confronted with Charter disputes. Thus, convergence theory gets some qualified support when applied to the Canadian Supreme Court's citation practices. The authors provide several complementary explanations for this evidence of policy emulation, suggesting that it stems from the individual attitudes of justices, from the litigation strategies pursued by groups and from broader societal values that the justices adhere to in their rulings. As such, foreign citation patterns of justices on the Supreme Court of Canada should not only be of interest to public law scholars, but to political scientists generally. La théorie sur la convergence des politiques soutient que les dirigeants des sociétés imitent souvent les solutions politiques qui ont fait leur preuve dans d'autres contextes. Les dirigeants peuvent également, cependant, rejeter les alternatives politiques menant à des divergences. Cette étude examine la portée de la convergence (ou des divergences) des politiques dans le cadre des pratiques de citation de la Cour suprême du Canada, lorsque celles-ci concernent les autorités de d'autres pays, les États-Unis en particulier. Ses conclusions rejoignent celles de travaux antérieurs qui ont constaté une augmentation des citations des lois américaines depuis l'adoption de la Charte canadienne des droits et libertés, en l982. Les juges de la Cour Suprême du Canada continuent d'accorder une attention importante aux doctrines légales des cours des autres pays, en particulier lorsqu'ils sont confrontés à des contestations de la Charte. Donc la théorie de la convergence est confirmée dans une certaine mesure par les pratiques de citation de la Cour suprême du Canada. L'article fournit plusieurs explications complémentaires de cette politique d'imitation, suggérant qu'elle origine des attitudes individuelles des juges, des stratégies de contestation utilisées par les groupes et, plus largement, des valeurs sociétales auxquelles se référent les juges dans leurs décisions. Par conséquent, les patterns de citation des jurisprudences étrangères de la Cour suprême du Canada devraient intéressé, non seulement les chercheurs en droit public, mais les spécialistes de la science politique en général.
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 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 | 0.034 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 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".