Bobbitt’s Paradise: Canadian Constitutional Interpretation and Public Meaning Originalism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: Bobbitt’s Paradise: l’interpretazione costituzionale canadese e il Public Meaning Originalism – In his testimony to Congress, Professor Solum has concisely set out the nature of, and justification for, his preferred method of constitutional interpretation: public meaning originalism. In this reply, the author discusses the extent to which Professor Solum's ideas have found some purchase in Canadian courts. Despite the Supreme Court of Canada's clear commitment to interpreting the constitution like a living and apparent unanimity on the proper interpretive approach, this consensus may be only skin-deep. While Canadian courts appear to agree that every possible interpretive source may be consulted, they have not provided guidance on when certain considerations (such as text and history) should outweigh others (such as pragmatic considerations and contemporary values). Instead, the courts often appear to pick and choose between various sources or methods of interpretation, in any given case, according to sensibility and conscience. Through a review of the insights contained in Professor Solum's testimony, the author proposes some areas for reflection, and attempts to encourage some principled disagreements on the issue of constitutional interpretation in Canada. Keywords: Constitutional interpretation, Living constitutionalism, Living tree, Originalism.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.039 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| 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".