A Relational Approach to Constitutional Interpretation: Shared Legislative and judicial Responsibilities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms has fundamentally changed governing principles. This essay suggests that judgements about the Charter be viewed as a shared responsibility that is conceived in relational terms. Two different forms of relationship arise under the Charter and influence the judgements that each set of institutional actors makes. One relationship arises from the fact that Parliament and the judiciary are situated differently, relative to the Charter conflict. Political and judicial judgements about how to reconcile conflicting rights and values are influenced by these different points of reference, by the distinct institutional characteristics that Parliament and the judiciary possess, and by the specific responsibilities that characterize their roles. A second form of relationship is the one between Parliament and the judiciary, which arises from the need to reflect on and react to the other's judgement. Both parliamentary and judicial judgements are influenced by the foreseeable knowledge that their respective interpretations may not be the final word on the reconciliation of rights and values. A relational approach conveys the separate yet interconnected approaches taken to rendering judgement. It assumes that both Parliament and courts have valid insights into how legislative objectives should reflect and respect the Charter's normative values. By conceiving of constitutional judgements as a shared responsibility, this has the potential to broaden the level of scrutiny that may otherwise occur if either Parliament or courts were assumed to have the only valid opinion on the merits of legislative choices from a rights perspective.
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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 | 0.019 | 0.025 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.088 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| 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".