Working with Bertha Wilson: Perspectives on Liberty, Judicial Decision-Making and a Judge’s Role
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the way in which Justice Wilson approached decision-making in several significant Charter cases concerning freedom of expression and liberty that came before the Supreme Court of Canada during its 1989-90 term. The author explores Bertha Wilson’s views on the constitutional constraints within which judicial decision-making must take place and her understanding of a judge’s role. The paper emphasizes her concern to develop sound methodological approaches to analyzing those aspects of the Charter rights at play in the cases that came before the Court. It also observes that she took great care not to deal with questions concerning the scope or substance of Charter rights that were not engaged in the cases before the Court. The paper stresses that much can be learned about her views on the constitutional limits to a judge’s role from an examination of paths that she did not go down when engaged in Charter analysis. The author concludes that Justice Wilson’s decisions were the outcome of a well-developed view of the constraints within which the judiciary must operate in order to maintain its legitimacy.
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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 | 0.011 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.056 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".