A New Subtlety in Judicial Supremacy: Review of the 2003-2004 Constitutional Cases
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As the debate over new appointments may suggest, there is a need to protect the legitimacy of the Court as a legal (rather than political) institution. These factors lead, I think, to a new subtlety in the ways that the Court describes its own work and its position in the Canadian system. We can therefore see hints in the Charter cases that some justices are working to avoid the perceptionthat the Supreme Court of Canada is a place for politics. This they can do through expressions of distaste when something they choose to call arrives at the Court, and frequent assertions of deference to Parliament. Yet at the same time, the tests which the Court is creating and the ways in which they are being applied serve to increase the Court's discretionary powers. The Court is required to walk a fine line in between upholding the Constitution and usurping the power of Parliament, and a close look at this year's balancing act reveals just how difficult defining that line can be. The Court will have difficulty trying to outrun the perception that they are engaging in a form of judicial politics (although whether or not this is a criticism of the Court is another question). The cases this year feed that perception by failing to develop bright line tests. To the extent that the Court is using context specific, flexible analysis which rely heavily on the factual matrix, and particularly where the tests involve balancing, the line between law and politics - assuming it exists becomes increasingly blurred.This article reviews the constitutional cases decided by the Supreme Court of Canada in the 2003-2004 term. For the purposes of this piece, the term runs from August 2003 to June 2004. Only cases in which the Constitution figured prominently in the Supreme Court's decision are included (cases in which reasons were not provided are excluded). Part II of this article will consider cases involving freedom of religion and expression. Part III looks at the cases decided under section 7, while Part IV reviews this year's Charter equality cases. Part V looks at three section 8 search and seizure cases. In Part VI, the important Doucet-Boudreau decision on remedy is described. Finally, Part VII considers the division of powers cases. The Supreme Court did not closely consider any constitutional section which falls outside of thesecategories.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".