The Role of Religion in the Law of Royal Succession in Canada and Australia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is sometimes assumed that Commonwealth nations share the same law of succession, including the religious tests that govern succession to the British Crown. This assumption has led some to argue that the laws of succession in Commonwealth countries such as Canada and Australia are immune to constitutional challenges in order to reconcile these religious tests with the constitutional guarantees of religious freedom in those countries. Through a comparative examination of the laws of succession and constitutional protections of religious liberty in Canada and Australia, the author of this article challenges these propositions and argues that each country has a distinct law of succession that is subject to different constitutional scrutiny within their respective regimes. Beginning with a discussion of the religious tests that govern British royal succession, the author lays out the conflict these create with religious protections in sections 2(a) and 15(1) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and section 116 of the Australian Constitution. The author then reviews the laws of succession of Canada and Australia and the relationship between these laws and that of the UK. From this review, the author argues that there is a single rule in the Canadian law of succession, the rule of symmetry, which requires the Canadian monarch to be the same as the British one. Conversely, the author argues that Australia adopted the British law of succession into Australian law via its constitution. The author thus concludes that while the UK’s religious tests impact succession to the Crown of Canada, they are not subject to constitutional challenge there because they are not part of Canadian law. In contrast, those same tests are subject to challenge in Australia and are likely invalid there because they became subject to the Australian Constitution when they became part of Australian law.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".