Distant Echoes: Discussing Judicial Activism at Canadian and American Supreme Court Nomination Hearings
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper begins by tracing Canadians’ concerns about judicial activism. Part II surveys how academics, commentators, and others have reacted to perceived overreaches by Canada’s highest court over time. By evaluating the comments made by Justices Marshall Rothstein, Michael Moldaver, Andromache Karakatsanis, and Richard Wagner at their nominee hearings, Part III shows the paucity of official public discussion on the topic. Changing countries, Part IV explains how judicial activism has been canvassed recently in American Supreme Court nomination hearings; this part assesses how the topic has been addressed during and since Chief Justice John Roberts’s confirmation hearing in 2005. Part V analyzes Justice Nadon’s comments and demonstrates how they depart from Canadian precedent and towards a deeper, more American focus on the topic’s vagaries. Part VI concludes with some thoughts on what Nadon’s comments may portend should televised ad hoc committee hearings for Supreme Court nominees be restarted.
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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 | 0.010 | 0.028 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.063 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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; 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".