Developments in Administrative Law: The 2007-2008 Term - The Impact of Dunsmuir
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The 2007-2008 term was a landmark year in Canadian administrative law. The Supreme Court of Canada decision in Dunsmuir v. New Brunswick (2008 SCC 9) affected dramatically the approach to determining the applicable standard of review in administrative law. The Dunsmuir decision caused a fervour of discussion among practitioners, judges, academics and all those involved in the administrative justice community. It essentially eclipsed all other administrative law cases decided in the 2007-2008 Supreme Court term. This article discusses findings from an examination of cases that have been decided by lower courts, between the decision date and the end of 2007-2008 Supreme Court term, as a measure of Dunsmuir's impact with respect to the standard of review jurisprudence.\nDunsmuir picked up on Justice Lebel's earlier critiques of the current state of the law and was used as a platform for improving the methodology for substantive review of administrative action. Although Dunsmuir purports to make a significant change to the way that the standard of review analysis is undertaken, many of the modifications simply codify existing legal principles. As well, in some respects, Dunsmuir clarifies the standard of review methodology; however, the new approach has significant ambiguities which are being experienced by lower courts. In short, although Dunsmuir has taken the standard of review jurisprudence to a certain point, there are many pressing questions still to be answered.With respect to procedural fairness, Dunsmuir has also had a significant impact - it has reversed the holding in Knight v. Indian Head School Division No. 19 ([1990] 1 S.C.R. 653) that procedural fairness is always owed in the dismissal of public servants, holding instead that common law principles of contract may govern the employment relationship between public officeholders and the Crown.
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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 | 0.018 | 0.037 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.024 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".