Strategic Leadership and Political Change on the Canadian Supreme Court: Analyzing the Transition to Chief Justice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract. This study discusses theoretical concepts from two strands of public law literature, namely rational choice accounts of strategic behaviour and notions of judicial leadership, and examines their relevance for explaining changes in judicial behaviour on the Canadian Supreme Court. Specifically, we test whether a justice who is elevated to the chief position strategically alters his/her patterns of judicial behaviour. The study uses a multiple regression equation that controls for rival hypotheses, and uncovers evidence of strategic change by all three modern chief justices. While Justices Dickson and Lamer appear to have consolidated their position as task leaders once they were promoted to the helm of the Court, Justice McLachlin made a remarkable change in her dissent behaviour to emerge as the preeminent social leader on her own Court. The study demonstrates that rational choice models of strategic behaviour and judicial leadership are useful theoretical frameworks for explaining changes in behaviour once recent Canadian justices were promoted to the chief position. Moreover, the findings illustrate the importance of incorporating critical institutional features when studying changing behaviour in other high courts around the world. Résumé. Cette étude discute des concepts théoriques de deux composantes de la littérature du droit public, à savoir les témoignages de choix rationnel en fait de comportement stratégique et les notions de leadership judiciaire, et examine leur pertinence pour expliquer les changements de comportement judiciaire à la Cour suprême du Canada. Plus précisément, nous cherchons à déterminer si un juge qui devient juge en chef impose des changements stratégiques à son comportement judiciaire. L'étude utilise une équation de régression multiple qui neutralise les hypothèses rivales, et découvre des preuves de changement stratégique chez les trois juges en chef contemporains. Tandis que les juges Dickson et Lamer semblent avoir consolidé leur position de responsables de tâche après leur accession à la tête de la Cour, Madame le juge McLachlin transforma son comportement de dissidente pour devenir le leader social confirmé de sa propre Cour. L'étude démontre que les modèles de choix rationnel en fait de comportement stratégique et de leadership judiciaire sont des cadres théoriques utiles pour expliquer les changements de comportement des juges canadiens récemment promus à la position de juges en chef. En outre, l'étude démontre qu'il est important d'incorporer certaines caractéristiques institutionnelles clés lorsqu'on examine les changements de comportement dans d'autres tribunaux de grande instance de par le monde.
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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".