Expanding the Parameters of Participatory Public Law: A Democratic Right to Public Participation and the State’s Duty of Public Consultation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the potential for an improved and expanded democratic relationship between the state and its legal subjects in public law. In Part I, I synthesize several of the compatible features of liberal, civic republican, and deliberative democratic theories in order to advance a new framework for public law in Canada that grounds a right to public participation, and the state’s public consultation duties. The framework illustrates how liberalism, civic republicanism and deliberative democracy possess mutually beneficial effects for public law. This type of democratically-informed common law juridical relationship has not yet been achieved—the topic of Part II—but, in Part III, I employ two typical Canadian public law cases to highlight the nature of current limitations as a springboard to suggest that expanded participation rights are both immanent and possible in Canada. In Part IV, I argue that along with the framework from Part I, jurisprudential pieces are already in place to expand the parameters of participatory public law. Drawing on insights from other jurisdictions, current limitations and anxieties about this expansion can be mitigated or overcome. I then briefly consider two criticisms concerning the effect that more robust public participation requirements may have on courts and governments. Drawing on the theoretical framework presented in Part I, I conclude that an individual right to public participation combined with a general duty of public consultation is an essential legal requirement in modern rights-respecting democracies, such as Canada’s, which aspire to be deliberative, fair, and participatory.
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 | 0.003 | 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 | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".