The Past and Future of Constitutional Law and Social Justice: Majestic or Substantive Equality?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article addresses the past record and future prospects of the relationship between constitutional law and social justice. The exploration of this relationship is framed as a question of the role that constitutional law has played in protecting and advancing a substantive, rather than merely majestic (i.e., formal), conception of equality. After providing an overview of the current state of income deprivation and inequality in Canada, and the implications of this for a constitutional conception of equality, a variety of areas of constitutional law are examined. It is argued that, across these areas, constitutional law has regularly been willing to facilitate governmental action aimed at improving substantive equality, but has only rarely provided protection against governmental retrenchment and, especially in relation to Aboriginal rights, has not always acknowledged or accommodated the effect of already existing substantive inequality. Overall, while constitutional law has taken some important steps to protect and advance substantive equality, the steps have been small and so progress has been restrained and cautious. Looking ahead, and focusing on the Charter, it is argued that, if constitutional law is to play a more meaningful role in advancing substantive equality, then it needs to pay heed to the danger of being caught in a jurisprudential trap that threatens to curtail, if not undo, the modest support for substantive equality that has been shown so far.
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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 | 0.022 | 0.023 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.101 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.019 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".