Bibliographic record
Abstract
Dominant narratives about the institutional life of the Supreme Court of Canada pay too little attention to the empirical and theoretical insights of legal pluralism. They do not say enough about the Court’s place in a world in which the nature and experience of law are often understood without reference to state sources or institutions. As a result, the prevailing narratives do not speak to many social realities, fail to build on rich pluralist critiques of the Court’s jurisprudence, and disregard the aims and promise of doing legal theory. Relying on the Reference Re Senate Reform as a case study, this article points to shortcomings of contemporary understandings of the Court and proposes a way to overcome them. Part I presents four readings of the Supreme Court’s opinion in the Reference. Each focuses on a different dimension of the case—the doctrinal, the metaphorical, the institutional and the contextual. The readings are an invitation to notice the assumptions embedded in interpretations of the Reference and to explore the larger narratives of which they are a part. Part II takes up that invitation. It shows that the dominant narratives often reflect state-centric traditions of legal theory and impede inquiries into the Court’s place in a legally and institutionally plural world. It then presents a research agenda that maps a route toward filling this gap. Drawing on lessons of legal pluralism, the agenda encourages us to confront what we think we know—and what we tend to ignore—about the morality of the Court’s institutional design, about the Court’s place in Canada’s constitutional imagination, and about the significance of the Court in light of the myriad ways in which we access and pursue justice.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.033 | 0.077 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.025 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".