A False Start in Constitutionalizing Lawyer Loyalty in Canada (Attorney General) v. Federation of Law Societies of Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Canada (Attorney General) v. Federation of Law Societies of Canada, a majority of the Supreme Court of Canada surprised many legal observers by choosing to recognize a new principle of fundamental justice pursuant to section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms: a lawyer’s duty of commitment to a client’s cause. In this article, I critique the majority’s choice to recognize this new principle of fundamental justice after first reviewing the Court’s reasons and their background. At issue in this case was the constitutionality of the federal government’s statutory regime for preventing and investigating money laundering and terrorist financing to the extent that the regime applied to lawyers. Broadly speaking, the provisions at issue involved: (1) client identification and record-keeping obligations; and (2) authorization for warrantless searches of lawyers’ offices. The Court found that these provisions breached both sections 7 and 8 of the Charter in a manner not justifiable under section 1.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.024 | 0.038 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.042 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.022 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.022 | 0.026 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".