The Unanimous Decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada as a Test of the Attitudinal Model
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract.Most of the empirical work on the decision making of justices on the Supreme Court of Canada has taken as its exclusive focus the divided decisions of the Court. In contrast to this extensive body of research on divided decision, the much more limited knowledge of unanimous decisions is troubling because such decisions constitute nearly three-quarters of all of the formal decisions of the Court. The analysis reported below provides a first step towards understanding the neglected nature of unanimous decisions. This investigation of the nature and causes of unanimity in the Supreme Court of Canada explores two competing explanations: one drawn from the most widely accepted general explanation of judicial voting (that is, the attitudinal model) and the other from the perspectives of the justices themselves. To determine that perspective, the author interviewed ten of the current or recent justices on the Court. After describing these two alternative accounts of unanimity, empirical tests are conducted of the implications of each view. We find substantially more support for the perspectives of the justices than for the perspective derived from the attitudinal model on unanimity. Résumé.La majeure partie du travail de recherche empirique portant sur la manière dont les juges de la Cour suprême du Canada prennent leurs décisions se concentre exclusivement sur les décisions divisées de cette institution. En contraste avec cette foison d'études sur les décisions divisées, le corpus beaucoup plus limité de connaissances sur les décisions unanimes pose un problème important, car celles-ci représentent presque les trois quarts de la totalité des décisions formelles de la Cour suprême. L'analyse présentée ci-dessous se veut un premier pas vers une meilleure connaissance de la nature, trop négligée jusqu'à présent, de ces décisions unanimes. Cette investigation sur la nature et les causes de l'unanimité dans les décisions de la Cour suprême du Canada explore deux voies se trouvant en compétition : l'une qui résulte de l'explication la plus largement acceptée du vote judiciaire (soit le modèle attitudinal), et l'autre qui découle de la perspective personnelle des juges. Pour élucider cette perspective propre des juges, les auteurs ont interviewé dix juges actuels et récents de la Cour suprême du Canada. Après avoir décrit ces deux explications alternatives de l'unanimité, ils effectuent des tests empiriques sur les implications respectives du modèle attitudinal et des perspectives propres des juges. L'étude révèle que les perspectives propres des juges ont beaucoup plus de poids que la perspective dérivée du modèle attitudinal en ce qui concerne l'unanimité.
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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 | 0.009 | 0.039 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".