Enhancing Constitutional Self-Understanding Through Comparative Law: An Empirical Study of the Use of Foreign Case Law by the Supreme Court of Canada (1982-2013)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since the enactment of the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the Supreme Court of Canada has established itself as one of the most progressive and genuinely global constitutional judges in the world. The Charter - inspired by the United States Bill of Rights and several international human rights documents - prompted the Court to refer to an extensive range of foreign jurisdictions, including Australia, Israel, New Zealand, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States. The purpose of this work is to achieve a better understanding of the decision-making process informing the Court’s activity in today’s globalized legal context and of the role played by the Charter in this process. To this purpose, the contribution presents an empirical quantitative and qualitative analysis of the Court’s judgments issued between 1982 and 2013 and shows that the Court, in deciding constitutional cases and interpreting the newly enacted Charter has consistently considered other jurisdictions. Indeed, in referring to cases decided by - among others - American, Australian, British and various European courts, the Court has, over the years, established its Charter jurisprudence by drawing critical inspiration from foreign judicial decisions and by adapting their legal principles to the unique features of Canada’s legal system and society, ultimately enhancing the Court's constitutional understanding of the Canadian legal systems through the use of comparative law and foreign legal sources.
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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 | 0.014 | 0.050 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.017 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.042 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".