Legislatures as Constitutional Interpretation: Another Dialogue
Bibliographic record
Abstract
I am especially grateful for this occasion to discuss the much overlooked role of the legislatures in the interpretation of the Canadian Constitution. Indeed, courts are seen as the main – if not the only – interpreters of the Constitution, and often criticized for what is seen as expanding their role into “lawmaking” at the expense of legislatures. However, the balance between the two institutions is more subtle and it is in that quite intricate web of interrelations that constitutional interpretation must be understood. I begin by briefly debunking a prevalent myth by showing both that the interpretive role of the courts has not increased as much as many claim since the entrenchment of the Charter , and that such a role is not now or ever has been exercised in a totally discretionary manner. I will then put the role of the legislatures in proper theoretical perspective by showing that far from only having the last word through the notwithstanding clause , they always have the first and most often the only word in a scenario where their interpretation prevails in the vast majority of instances, as they engage democratically in an altogether different dialogue than the institutional one. DEBUNKING A MYTH It is widely held, not only in the general public but unfortunately also in parts of the legal community, that the courts, and especially the Supreme Court of Canada, have dramatically increased and changed their role and their relationship to legislatures since the entrenchment of the Charter in 1982.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.037 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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".