Black v Chretien and Suit Against a Minister of the Crown for Abuse of Power, Misfeasance in Public Office and Negligence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister advised The Queen to elevate Conrad Black, a Canadian businessman, to the peerage. However, Jean Chretien, Prime Minister of Canada, intervened, and advised the Queen to not confer the peerage on Mr Black. Acting upon this latter advice (which Mr Chretien was entitled to give as chief minister to the Queen of Canada), the Queen - now in her capacity of Queen of the United Kingdom - declined to ennoble Mr Black. As a consequence Black sued the Prime Minister and the Attorney-General of Canada for abuse of power, misfeasance in public office and negligence. Although the Ontario Court of Appeal rejected Black's case - on the grounds that the advice tendered to the Queen by Mr Chretien was non-justiciable, this litigation has raised important constitutional questions. In particular, what happens when conflict occurs between Crown's advisors, and to what extent can the British and Canadian Crowns be disentangled, given the commonality of person and the historic legal continuity of the two constitutions? This problem could be avoided if the respective Ministers, British and Canadian, were to reconcile any difficulties and so prevent the Queen from being placed in an otherwise intolerable position. Doubtless, the British Prime Minister did not insist upon Conrad Black's peerage being conferred - indeed, when the dispute first arose his spokesman cautiously observed that it is the practice to seek the approval of the Canadian government when it is proposed that a Canadian citizen is honoured. Yet, the British Prime Minister had already advised the Queen, and he could have chosen to insist upon that advice being followed. This could have presented a constitutional dilemma of some difficulty for the Sovereign.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.019 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.002 |
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".