Rethinking the Interpretation of Bilingual Legislation: The Demise of the Shared Meaning Rule
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article assesses the value of the meaning as an approach to the interpretation of bilingual statutory provisions in which discrepancies occur between the two language versions. It identifies the three types of discrepancies that arise, shows how those discrepancies originate in drafting errors, and examines the ability of the shared meaning rule to uncover those errors. It then contrasts the rule's approach to the manner in which the courts have interpreted divergent text in similar situations. Based on this analysis, it suggests that the shared meaning rule is unsatisfactory from a theoretical perspective and that it lacks predictive value. The article proposes that in cases of linguistic divergence, rather than looking for a meaning shared between the two language versions, the courts should search for the single meaning that is most harmonious with the scheme of the Act and its apparent purpose. It concludes that courts should discard the shared meaning rule and instead start with a presumption favouring clarity and then interpret each version using the standard techniques of statutory interpretation-looking to the purpose of the Act, its internal consistency and legislative evolution, and the relevant presumptions of legislative intent-to determine which language version produces the most coherent legislative scheme.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 it