The Environmental Revolution and the Supreme Court of Canada: Empirical Analysis of Postmaterialist Value Change Across Four Decades*
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objective This study examines Ronald Inglehart's theory of value change in the Supreme Court of Canada. The theory has received little attention in the public law literature, yet its central tenet suggests that intergenerational value change might influence the way that Supreme Court justices decide cases over time. Method Using a socio‐attitudinal model of judicial behavior, the study analyzes all environmental decisions between 1973 and 2010. Case outcomes are coded as either pro‐environmental (1) or anti‐environmental (0). Logistic regression analysis examines whether Court tenures, case facts, and judge‐level variables have a significant impact on predicting a postmaterialist outcome. Results We find evidence of postmaterialist, pro‐environmental value change, with more contemporary justices exhibiting pro‐environmental positions, even in the face of rival variables. Conclusion Our results suggest that intergenerational value change has influenced decision making in Canadian environmental cases over the last 40 years, and indicate the theory may have relevance for explaining other high court change over time in a postmaterialist direction.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".