The 'Fusion' of Law and Equity?: A Canadian Perspective on the Substantive, Jurisdictional, or Non-Fusion of Legal and Equitable Matters
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Equity, in its broad understanding, has long been a fundamental part of law. Its history may be traced through principles illustrated in the Old Testament and, in various formulations, through Ancient Greek and Roman legal constructs, as well as in Natural Law and Canon Law. While the historic presence of equity within various systems of law is unquestioned, the jurisdiction of equity within contemporary legal systems has been a matter of significant debate and confusion. Facilitating a better understanding of the contemporary role of equity requires knowledge of its meaning and the implications of the historic merger of legal and equitable jurisdictions. This paper establishes a framework for appreciating the contemporary challenges faced by equity by examining the Supreme Court of Canada’s analysis of the merger of legal and equitable jurisdictions in two major cases involving allegations of breaches of fiduciary duty: Canson Enterprises Ltd v Boughton & Co and Hodgkinson v Simms. The inconsistent application of equitable principles in these cases demonstrates the court’s confusion over the effects of the historic merger of law and equity and offers a valuable perspective for the administration of justice in contemporary law.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.066 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".