Rethinking the Sex Discrimination Act - Does Canada’s Experience Suggest We Should Give Our Judges a Greater Role?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is not uncommon to hear laments about how Australian judges have failed to progress or even undermined gender equality by providing conservative or technical interpretations of anti-discrimination legislation and reinforcing merely a formal notion of equality. However, a comparison of Australian and Canadian anti-discrimination statutes suggests that the way in which Australian anti-discrimination laws have been drafted both reflects and possibly reinforces a very limited role for our judiciary in mediating value conflicts and addressing complex social problems such as inequality. The open textured drafting style of Canadian human rights statutes and the advent of the Charter have given the Canadian courts the power and legitimacy to develop more interesting and effective approaches to equality and discrimination than judges in Australia who have highly prescriptive legislation that reflects and reinforces a strict separation of powers and narrow judicial role. This raises the question: Should we give our judges a greater role?
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| 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".