Canadian Exclusion of Evidence Under Section 24(2) of the <i>Charter</i>: An Empirical Model of Judicial Discourse
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Margit Cohn and Mordechai Kremnitzer developed a multidimensional 17-parameter model, in 2005, to measure the judicial discourse in the decisions of constitutional courts. A court rendered a decision that was activist when it made a decision outside the traditional scope of judicial constraints on government action and that was restrained when they adhered to the principles of traditional adjudication roles. Previously, this model was successfully operationalized, by Jochelson et al. (2012), to analyse significant changes in the interpretation of search and seizure law in the judicial discourse of the Supreme Court of Canada, before and after 9/11. We now use the model to expand that analysis to section 24(2) exclusion of evidence cases under the Charter. By using a 1–10 Likert scale for each Cohn/Kremnitzer indicium of analysis, a value was assigned to each variable of every case and then the pre-9/11 case group were compared to the post-9/11 one. Our data analysis shows increased restraint on the part of the Supreme Court in 7 of the 13 variables of judicial discourse measured after 9/11, even when factoring in the landmark decision in R v Grant (2009). These changes are consistent with the post-9/11 literature on securitization: 9/11 was a moment when the state was given excuses to control, using security as justification for precautionary and risk-averse actions. While we cannot assert any causal relationships between these changes and 9/11, the caveats still permit significant findings, the most intriguing being that the Court has shifted, in its discourse on the exclusion of evidence, toward an ethic of more restraint. These findings stand alongside other studies that have found similarly in the area of search and seizure law.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".