Law's meanings for equality in the Americas : less impoverished visions for Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Equality is a ubiquitous concept that many assume is intuitively understood. There is however significant contention over its ‘true’ meaning. Following the enactment of constitutionalized equality guarantees under s. 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, there were high expectations for judicial interpretation that moved decisively away from a formal equality conception and embraced a substantive understanding. An extensive critique emerged early in response to the Supreme Court of Canada’s jurisprudence and criticism has been sustained. For its part, the Court has consistently framed its approach as that of “substantive equality”. Although its jurisprudence purportedly incorporates substantive elements that extend beyond the formalist “treating likes alike” and “same treatment” approach, the widespread disappointment is generally well-founded, given the gap between aspiration or rhetoric and the Court’s judgments. The arguably contingent nature of equality means that other rights protection systems have generated different conceptions of its meaning. The approach to equality in the Inter-American human rights system (IAHRS) offers one such set of understandings. The objective of bringing together these two different systems is to consider how s. 15 jurisprudence falls short of a substantive equality vision, by considering the regional rights system of which Canada is a member. Critical equality scholarship provides the basis for elaborating key elements of substantive equality. Three such elements are highlighted in evaluating the Court’s jurisprudence and how the IAHRS’s equality law and discourse stands up to a similar analysis, namely, the contextualized methodology, an indivisible approach to social rights, and a strong state responsibility doctrine. The two systems are generating different equality meanings and the IAHRS’s framework is more consonant with redress of pervasive substantive inequalities in the Americas, including through its employment of a deeply contextualized analysis, the development of positive state obligations and ‘indivisible’ approaches to equality in conjunction with other civil, political, social, cultural and economic rights. As such, the IAHRS is of interest to Canadian equality-seeking groups, including those interested in exploring engagement with the system. At a minimum, the IAHRS’s understandings may stir the legal imagination of advocates assessing future strategies for transformative social change in Canada.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.036 | 0.047 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.027 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.019 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".