Canadian Judicial Nomination Processes and the Press : ‘Interesting, in a Sleepy Sort of Way’
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Most of the recent appointees to the Supreme Court of Canada have participated in a new Canadian judicial nomination process initiated by the current Conservative government. As originally formulated in early policy platforms, the process was intended to mimic features of US Senate judicial confirmation hearings and so would highlight the distinction (popular in US political discourse) between ‘applying’ and ‘making’ law. This led to widespread fears that any new public process would politicize judicial appointments and functions at the Supreme Court. The process turned out to be much more tepid than anticipated and so raises questions about what Canadians may have learned as a consequence of this new nomination process. This paper undertakes a qualitative analysis of reporting of four nomination processes from a select number of Canadian newspapers. The main object is to determine the degree to which readers might have been alerted to the distinction between law and politics or, put another way, between judicial activism and restraint. It turns out that this framing was not dominant in the coverage and that, instead, distinctive Canadian political preoccupations, like language politics, got channeled through this new political opportunity structure. The press, nevertheless, for the most part liked what they saw. Simply by focusing their gaze on the court and its nominees, the press reinforced the law’s power and allure. La mayoría de las personas nombradas recientemente a la Corte Suprema de Canadá han participado en un nuevo proceso de nombramiento judicial iniciado en Canadá por el actual gobierno conservador. Tal y como se indicó de forma temprana en plataformas políticas, el proceso estaba destinado a imitar las características de las audiencias de confirmación judicial del Senado de los Estados Unidos y pretendía destacar la distinción (popular en el discurso político de los Estados Unidos) entre 'aplicar' y 'hacer' la ley. Esto levantó un temor generalizado de que cualquier nuevo proceso público iba a politizar los nombramientos y las funciones judiciales de la Corte Suprema. El proceso resultó mucho más tibio de lo previsto, lo que plantea preguntas acerca de lo que los canadienses pueden haber aprendido como consecuencia de este nuevo proceso de nombramiento. Este artículo realiza un análisis cualitativo de la cobertura mediática de cuatro procesos de nombramiento de un determinado número de periódicos canadienses. El objetivo principal es determinar el grado en el que los lectores podrían haber sido alertados de la distinción entre el derecho y la política o, dicho de otro modo, entre el activismo judicial y la limitación. Resulta que esta perspectiva no fue dominante en la cobertura, y que, en cambio, consiguieron canalizar a través de esta nueva estructura de oportunidad política las preocupaciones políticas canadienses distintivas, como la política lingüística. A la mayor parte de la prensa, sin embargo, le gustó lo que vio. Simplemente centrando su mirada en la Corte y sus candidatos, la prensa reforzó el poder y atractivo del derecho. DOWNLOAD THIS PAPER FROM SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2511239
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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; 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".