REVISITING THE ROLE OF PRESUMPTIONS OF LEGISLATIVE INTENT IN STATUTORY INTERPRETATION
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper proposes a fundamental reshaping of the law regarding presumptions of legislative intent in statutory interpretation. Looking to substantive presumptions in particular, it reviews the jurisprudence and concludes that greater consistency would be desirable and that tensions should be resolved between the traditional approach to substantive presumptions and the modern approach to statutory interpretation consistently adopted by the Supreme Court of Canada. Our proposal seeks to provide a uniform methodology for the use of substantive presumptions by incorporating them into the contextual analysis mandated by the modern approach set out in Re Rizzo & Rizzo Shoes Ltd, [1998] 1 SCR 27, 154 DLR (4th) 193. Rejecting the language of “presumptions” and rules of “strict” or “liberal” construction, it argues in favour of interpretation that relies on a transparent discussion of all relevant sources of statutory meaning (including textual and contextual sources, such as the values underlying substantive presumptions) and against a reflexive or mechanical application of substantive presumptions.
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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".