Modelling the Formal Division of Legal Authority in Canadian Constitutionalism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Traditionally, systems of constitutional democracy fell into two categories: parliamentary sovereignty, characterized by the omnipotence of Parliament and the absence of any substantive limitations on its power; and judicial supremacy, characterized by the presence of restrictions on legislative power in the form of a judicially enforced, written constitution containing a bill of rights. Recently, scholars have noted that Canada’s Charter regime includes elements of both traditional systems and have proposed new ways of understanding the apparent “sharing” of legal authority between courts and legislatures in Canada. These “new models” incorporate several key features of the traditional models but purport to be distinctive, and more accurate, accounts of how legal authority is allocated. Key features of the new models include a bill of rights, judicial review of legislation, and the preservation of legislative finality over the bill of rights through an “override” mechanism. However, these new models fail to capture the division of lawmaking power that is formally entrenched in section 33 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In addition, they do not provide an adequate account of how the legislative finality provided through the “override” mechanism distinguishes the new models from legislative supremacy. A proposed “hybrid” model accommodates the formal division of legal power in the Charter and raises new questions about the extent of legislative finality in Canadian constitutionalism. The hybrid model also explains Canada’s supposed lapse into de facto judicial supremacy as an indication of a nuanced and compartmentalized form of legislative supremacy.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
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".