The Coxford Lecture: Judging The Judges: “May They Boldly Go Where Ivan Rand Went Before”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Justice Ivan Rand was perhaps the greatest exponent of the rule of law in the history of the Supreme Court of Canada. He was a great judge. He scorned as impractical the admonition that judges should “apply the law, not make it”. His judgements frequently broke new ground, but it should be understood that in “making the law” great judges like Ivan Rand respond to fundamental considerations of order and fairness and not to personal whim. It is sometimes necessary for judges to return to first principles to provide legislators with a framework within which to operate in unforeseen situations. The word “activism” is usually used by critics to imply that a judge is pushing the envelope beyond the proper boundaries of the law, but properly understood the term may equally indicate a judicial tightening of the boundaries to deny the bench a power seemingly conferred by the Constitution or legislation. Restraint, as much as expansion, is governed by the judges’ recognition of the limits of their institutional competence and their appreciation of their role in the constitutional scheme. In the absence of statutory authority the courts have not yet addressed issues related to globalization and human rights with the sort of boldness and creativity we associate with great judges like Ivan Rand. Order and fairness have acquired a global dimension. Globalization offers a different kind of challenge, but is no less demanding of the rule of law. In the case of creating some form or forum of relief for Third World victims of globalization, we seem to have used restraint as an excuse for inertia. Judges need to be practical, but their greatness will rest on their capacity to see not only what the law is but what it should become. There is a time for boldness and a time for restraint and judges should be judged on their ability to tell the difference.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".