MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W2583353677 · doi:10.1017/9781316672228.005

The “Uncomfortable Embrace”: The Supreme Court and the Media in Canada

2016· book-chapter· en· W2583353677 on OpenAlexaffabout
Susan Harada

Bibliographic record

VenueCambridge University Press eBooks · 2016
Typebook-chapter
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicJudicial and Constitutional Studies
Canadian institutionsCarleton University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsSupreme courtPrime ministerLawEconomic JusticePolitical sciencePolitics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The headlines were unprecedented. “Stephen Harper lashes out at top judge on Supreme Court”; “Chief Justice hits back at Prime Minister over claim of improper call”; “Duelling statements over Nadon appointment reveal PMO fight with top court.” Riveting as they were, they did not begin to capture the depth of the drama playing out in the nation's capital in May 2014 – then- Prime Minister Stephen Harper issuing a statement suggesting Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin of the Supreme Court of Canada tried to engage him “on a matter that is or may be” before the court; the chief justice issuing her own counterstatement to categorically deny there was ever any such communication between her and the government. The spectacle played out for weeks, drawing in the opposition parties in Parliament, the Canadian legal community, and the news media. It spilled onto the global stage: the American College of Trial Lawyers supported McLachlin, as did the International Commission of Jurists, which investigated the available facts and concluded that Harper's criticism “was not well-founded and amounted to an encroachment upon the independence of the judiciary and integrity of the Chief Justice.” While surprising in its tone, the Conservative prime minister's eruption did not come out of the blue. It was ostensibly tied to the failed appointment of Marc Nadon, Harper's choice to fill one of three seats on the Supreme Court reserved for Quebec. Nadon was a semiretired Federal Court of Appeal judge with a track record regarded as unremarkable by commentators, save for a dissent in which he alone sided with the government in Khadr v. Canada (Prime Minister) , involving the repatriation of a Canadian citizen imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay. After the Nadon appointment was challenged, the Supreme Court was thrust into the political fray. In Reference Re Supreme Court Act, ss. 5 and 6 it was asked to clarify both the eligibility requirements for judges representing Quebec and the scope of Parliament's power to unilaterally change the court's composition. The majority's decision essentially disqualified Nadon. It was widely seen as a blow to the government of the day, which had moved to pass a law to try to ensure his eligibility.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.004
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.153
Threshold uncertainty score0.983

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.004
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0020.004
Science and technology studies0.0350.017
Scholarly communication0.0210.005
Open science0.0020.003
Research integrity0.0040.007
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0160.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.018
GPT teacher head0.192
Teacher spread0.174 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designQualitative
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations2
Published2016
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venueCambridge University Press eBooksSame topicJudicial and Constitutional StudiesFrench-language works237,207