Book Review – Courting the Right (The Charter Revolution & the Court Party by F.L. Morton & Rainer Knopff)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Charter Revolution presents an updated synthesis of the argument that Ted Morton and Rainer Knopff advanced throughout the 1990s, namely that the rise of judicial power in public policymaking following the enactment of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms has put too much power in the hands of interest groups, especially those on the left, and thereby threatens the democratic fabric of Canada. These interest groups (gay and lesbian rights organizations, feminist groups, poverty activists and civil libertarians, among others) use Charter litigation to further their policy agendas, and because of this, are said to constitute the “Court Party.” This “Party,” according to Morton and Knopff, has succeeded in advancing its policy agenda, because several key actors in the judicial process sympathize with its goals and support its efforts. These actors include most notably, the law clerks of the Supreme Court of Canada, federal bureaucrats in charge of funding activist litigation, and law professors. Together, this alleged cabal has hijacked the Supreme Court and transformed it into a venue for advancing unpopular left causes to exclusion of public participation and public scrutiny.As this brief description suggests, The Charter Revolution is part partisan screed, part scholarly research and part meditation on the relationship between the political and judicial branches of government. However, the partisan screed surfaces time and time again to undermine the authors’ timely and challenging account of judicial policy under the Charter. Following the organization of the book, I consider the main thrust of the authors’ argument relating to the Court Party, the “jurocracy,” the state connection and the legal intelligentsia. I conclude by examining the position of this book in the literature on judicial power under the Charter in Canada.
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 | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.055 | 0.030 |
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".