R v Smith and Judicially Reviewing the Scope of Criminal Law under the Charter
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In R. v. Smith, the Supreme Court of Canada assessed the constitutionality of criminal prohibitions against the possession of marijuana in light of regulations that carved out a medical exception exclusively for dried marijuana. The Court held that the exception was too narrow and declared the criminal prohibitions of no force and effect to the extent that they prohibit a person with a medical authorization from possessing marijuana derivatives for medical purposes. Smith was the Court’s first real foray into the lengthy saga of medical marijuana Charter litigation and, at first glance, its decision appears to reflect a banal application of established law to a factual finding at trial. The Ontario Court of Appeal had decided 15 years earlier in R. v. Parker that it violated section 7 of the Charter to deprive an individual, by means of a criminal sanction, of access to marijuana reasonably required for the treatment of a serious medical condition. The Supreme Court simply applied that principle to the factual finding that, in some cases, non-dried marijuana is reasonably required for the treatment of some medical conditions.
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 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 | 0.009 | 0.028 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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".