Power, Discretion, and Vulnerability: Justice Wilson and Fiduciary Duty in the Corporate/Commercial Context
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Justice Bertha Wilson, the first woman appointed to an appellate court in Canada and the first woman appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada, recognized at the outset of her judicial tenure that the law develops incrementally with measured and balanced response to changing social norms. She found a number of commercial law principles fundamentally sound and was not persuaded of a need for a change when viewed from the perspective of gender. Yet where Justice Wilson concluded that commercial law was in need of adjustment, she did not hesitate to express her opinions, whether writing fro the court, or in a dissenting judgment.This chapter deals with two aspects of her contribution. First, development of the concept of fiduciary obligation in the corporate and commercial context, and the need for an equitable remedy where such obligations are breached. Justice Wilson's approach was novel as it recognized that, beyond the historically defined categories of fiduciary relationships, other circumstances may also give rise to fiduciary obligations without creating broad new categories. Her approach also acknowledged the importance of drawing out broad principles in respect of power and vulnerability and applying them to areas of law one might not have intuitively considered. The second aspect of her contribution to be examined is her recognition of the court's signalling role in development of corporate commercial law through the exercise of its leave powers.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.035 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".