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 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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".