Not Just the Government's Lawyer: The Attorney General as Defender of the Rule of Law
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper takes the position that the Attorney General is not just the government's lawyer, but plays an important role in protecting the rule of law within government. Part I explores the role of the Attorney General in Charter litigation, and argues that in appropriate cases the Attorney General can legitimately concede some issues. The role of the courts in the face of such concessions can be protected by allowing other parties such as interveners or court-appointed amicus curiae to defend the constitutionality of the legislation. The role of the legislature can also be protected if the Attorney General makes best efforts to persuade the Cabinet and legislatures to act on the understanding of the Charter that motivated the concessions. The same-sex marriage cases in Canada provide an example of how such concessions in Charter litigation should subsequently be implemented in legislation.Another implication of the Attorney General's independence from Cabinet with respect to constitutional litigation is that he or she may for institutional and systemic reasons defend legislation under the Charter, even when such defences are in tension with other governmental initiatives. For example, the Attorney General legitimately defended criminal laws against the possession of marijuana although at the same time the government was proposing decriminalization.Attorneys General also ensure respect for the law and the Charter within government by examining the consistency of bills with the Charter. Although the Attorney General of Canada has a statutory duty to report such inconsistencies, no reports have yet been made. In contrast, the Attorney-General of New Zealand frequently reports that both governmental and non-governmental bills are inconsistent with the Bill of Rights and also releases legal opinions on that question. Something closer to the New Zealand practice should be adopted in Canada despite claims of solicitor-client privilege and Cabinet confidentiality and solidarity. A move in that direction could play a positive role in increasing deliberation on the constitutionality of proposed bills and the appropriate use of sections 1 and 33 of the Charter, as well as in encouraging references of bills to the courts.
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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 | 0.009 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.024 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".