Democratic rights on trial : judicial reasoning, charter litigation, and the shaping of Canadian democracy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of this essay is to gain a greater understanding of judicial reasoning and strategic judicial behaviour through analysing Charter cases in one of its major subfields: democratic rights. While many authors have previously sought to address democratic rights cases dealing with judicial reasoning, none have offered a unified and comprehensive theory of democratic rights litigation that addresses all of the field’s major subcomponents, including prisoners’ voting rights, referendum and election campaign finance restrictions, party subsidies, and electoral boundaries. This essay will seek to provide a unified and comprehensive theory through looking at democratic rights cases involving all four major areas. It will ultimately argue that democratic rights litigation can best be understood as a product of tensions between two major lines of judicial reasoning, remedial egalitarianism and procedural libertarianism, over the constitutional meaning of equality. This essay will begin by exploring the nature of judicial reasoning and strategic behaviour, and then turn to defining and explaining the two major lines of judicial reasoning that characterize democratic rights litigation. Next, it will seek to apply the theoretical concepts of remedial egalitarianism and procedural libertarianism to explain judicial rulings involving the intersection between democratic rights on the one hand and freedom of expression and representation on the other. This essay concludes by speculating about where democratic rights litigation is likely to go in the future and how Canada’s experiences might be relevant to scholars abroad.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.025 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.042 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".