The Judicial Role in a Diverse Federation: Lessons from the Supreme Court of Canada, by Robert Schertzer
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The study of court decisions addressing the division of power in federations is a well-trodden topic for legal and politics scholars alike. However, while such studies have produced a rich body of research on different courts’ federalism jurisprudence, there have been far fewer studies that have tackled this topic with the objective of engaging with broader theory and policy. By situating his study of the Supreme Court of Canada’s federalism jurisprudence within the larger framework of federalism as tool for diversity and conflict management, Robert Schertzer makes a significant contribution not only to the study of Canadian federalism and its apex court but to federalism scholarship more generally. In particular, it effectively makes the case for why scholars should be mindful of the role federal arbiters play in managing conflict over the distribution of power and resources in federal systems. Schertzer’s analysis stands out for the depth of both its theoretical and empirical engagement. The book is effectively broken down into two sections. In the book’s first half, Schertzer reflects on how federalism has been treated as a means to manage diversity and conflict, as well as how scholars typically undervalue the role that federal arbiters play in the development of a federation and its legitimacy in diverse states. Rooted in Schertzer’s analysis is an important normative position: that the ideal federal model should see federal systems as the process and outcome of negotiation. This becomes especially important in diverse federations where the very nature of the state’s national composition is contested by various groups. This is apparent in Canada where three federal models (pan-Canadian, provincial-equality, multinational) have emerged that hold competing views of what the federation is and ought to be. The position taken by Schertzer is not to advocate for one model over another, but rather to recognize that different groups (such as Indigenous peoples, Québécois, and English-Canadians) hold these positions sincerely. Accordingly: “For Canada there is no ideal federal model; rather the federation should be promoted as a process through which the actors subscribing to the pan-Canadian, provincial-equality, and multinational visions work to reach agreement” (p. 88).
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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 | 0.002 | 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 | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".