Judicial Decisionmaking and the Use of Panels in the Canadian Supreme Court and the South African Appellate Division
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Research on the U.S. Supreme Court suggests that judges' decisions are influenced by their policy preferences. Moreover, judges behave strategically to facilitate outcomes that conform as close as possible to those preferences. We seek to generalize this assertion to judicial actors in two very diverse social systems: Canada in the post-Charter years and apartheid-era South Africa. Specifically, we analyze the use of panel assignments by the chief justices in both countries. We find that chief justices do behave strategically. Chief justices in both countries do not assign judges to panels randomly but rather are influenced by the tenure and ideology of the sitting judges and the issues presented in the case.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| 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 it