Constitutional and Common Law Dialogues between the Supreme Court and Canadian Legislatures
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Under both the Common law and the Charter, the Supreme Court engages in dialogue with legislatures. This dialogue allows legislatures to respond to the Court's decisions with ordinary legislation without having, as under the division of powers or the American Bill of Rights, to change the Court or the Constitution. The first part of the paper examines three forms of dialogical judicial review, namely those under which both courts and legislatures have an equal right to interpret the constitution; those which focus on the ultimate accountability of the Court to legislatures and society: and those which envision the Court and the legislatures playing distinct and complementary roles. It is suggested that all three theories of dialogue find some support in recent Supreme Court judgments. The second part examines the dialogic nature of common law decisions such as presumptions of mens rea and suggests that common law decisions including presumptions of statutory interpretation resemble Charter decisions in their dialogical nature more than division of powers decisions. The third part examines dialogue under the Charter with a focus on search and seizure powers and sexual assault law. The author argues that ordinary dialogue should occur under section 1 with legislatures clarifying their objectives and alternatives in response to the Court's decisions. Extraordinary dialogue that involves legislatures reversing Charter decisions on the basis of their own interpretation of the Constitution or their claim to hold the Court accountable should only occur with the sober second thoughts and guarantee of continued dialogue inherent in the use of the section 33 override.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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".