Feminists and the Courts: Measuring Success in Interest Group Litigation in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study proposes a new model for assessing success in interest group litigation. The model is applied to 47 appeal court rulings concerning feminist issues in 21 cases involving the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and 26 non-Charter cases. The study operationalizes the concept of ''success'' by including not just outcome (''who wins''), but also the effect of the case on the ''policy status quo'' (PSQ) and the creation of favourable or unfavourable legal resources (precedents). Feminist claims prevailed in 72 per cent of the cases. The PSQ optic reveals that previous studies overstate the significance of feminist losses (13), since only three of these changed the PSQ in a direction opposed by feminists. There were 17 cases that changed the PSQ in a direction desired by feminists. Feminist litigation has been most successful in the policy areas of abortion, private-sector discrimination and pornography. Success has been lowest in the areas of sexual assault and income tax. These findings suggest that interest group litigation can achieve significant policy change and that the scope of policy studies should be expanded to include judge-made policy.
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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 | 0.016 | 0.079 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.013 | 0.012 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".