Expert witnesses : why the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada selects legal mobilization
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Two recent areas of controversy include the "legalization" and the "evangelical-ization" of Canadian politics. The paper connects these two areas of controversy by examining why Canada’s largest evangelical interest group, the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada (EFC), has emerged as a frequent intervener in Canada's courts. In order to answer this question, the paper combines an analysis of the interveners at the Supreme Court 1985-2009 with a descriptive analysis of the EFC’s selection of legal mobilization that relies upon elite interviews, EFC publications, and public documents. The paper then tests the dominant explanations for interest group legal engagement (articulated as four hypotheses) against the EFC's experience. The paper shows that the EFC's selection of judicial engagement is not determined by their legal resources, the opening of political opportunities, or normative commitments to judicial review; but rather, by an “awakening” to the increased salience of the courts as a policy arena. Because of the EFC's ambivalence regarding the normative place of the judiciary in Canadian political life, I term their attitude "judicial realism". As a result of this perception, the EFC adds legal engagement to their other lobbying strategies. In order to be where important decisions are made, the EFC mobilizes in the courts. Because of this attitude towards judicial power, the evidence suggests that the EFC will continue to select legal engagement regardless of any advantages they may accrue in other lobbying arenas.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.037 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".