Networking the Rule of Law: The Canadian Bar Association’s Abandoned Intervention in Chevron v Yaiguaje
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article looks at public debates surrounding how a network of Canadian lawyers disrupted an amicus curiae intervention in the recent Supreme Court of Canada case of Chevron Corp. v Yaiguaje. Analysis of this case study troubles assumptions about where and how law is made and suggests possibilities for successful activist engagement. Working together on a variety of points on a spectrum as advocates, counsel, interveners, and activists, lawyers leveraged their professional networks to influence and govern a multinational corporation by affecting what arguments were raised inside the court. I analyze the public debate about intervention in the Yaiguaje case as a governmental event. This article specifically scrutinizes how political agencies exercised by Canadian lawyers outside of the courtroom in the context of their protests against the Canadian Bar Association’s proposal to intervene in the proceedings mobilized a substantive and social justice oriented variant on the construct of the rule of law. The article argues that this mobilization affected what Rosenau and Cziempiel, as well as Sørensen, Torfing and others call “network governance.” The article further suggests that the Yaiguaje decision, important in its own right, is also significant as an illustrative instance of how legal struggles happen not just, or even primarily, in the formal venues of courtrooms or legislative debates. The disruptive efficacy of network governance and the role of civil society organizations in interventions provide inspiration for how Canada’s public and lawyers may strategize to influence activity by multinationals, such as in the development of the oil sands.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.080 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.014 | 0.015 |
| 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".