Strategic Legitimacy Cultivation at the Supreme Court of Canada: Quebec<i>Secession Reference</i>and Beyond
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract. While the last few decades have witnessed increased political significance of the Canadian Supreme Court, the Court has also managed to safeguard its institutional legitimacy as evident in the high degree of support it enjoys among the Canadian public. Indeed, how do the Supreme Court of Canada, and high courts everywhere, ensure the attainment and retention of institutional legitimacy? The paper develops an answer to this question by presenting a strategic theory of legitimacy cultivation. The theory is applied and tested in the context of the 1998 Secession Reference case. The paper sheds a new light on the case, shows that patterns of judicial strategic behaviour can provide important insights into how the Supreme Court acquires institutional legitimacy and points out the significance of extending the strategic approach to the study of the Canadian Supreme Court. Résumé. L'importance politique de la Cour suprême du Canada s'est accrue de manière notable au cours des dernières décennies. Malgré tout, la Cour a réussi à maintenir sa légitimité institutionnelle, comme en fait foi le niveau de soutien élevé pour la Cour que manifeste la population canadienne. Mais comment la Cour suprême du Canada, ainsi que les cours suprêmes ailleurs dans le monde, s'assurent-elles de développer et de maintenir leur légitimité institutionnelle? Cet article propose une réponse à cette question en présentant une théorie stratégique du développement de la légitimité. La théorie est appliquée et testée dans le contexte du Renvoi relatif à la sécession du Québec de 1998. Cet article jette un regard différent sur cette décision en démontrant que certaines tendances dans le comportement judiciaire stratégique peuvent fournir des indices importants quant à l'acquisition de la légitimité institutionnelle. L'article souligne aussi l'importance d'étendre l'utilisation de l'approche stratégique à l'étude de la Cour suprême du Canada.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.005 |
| 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".