Bibliographic record
Abstract
No other judge has had as distinguished a career on the Supreme Court of Canada as Beverley McLachin. She was an exemplary Chief Justice, one of Canada’s finest, and is deeply respected as a jurist. Yet she remains an enigma, perplexing us still, in large part because her jurisprudence defied characterization throughout her 28-year tenure on the Court. This article seeks insight into her core commitments – what was sacred to Beverley McLachlin in judging – by drawing on her extra-curial reflections and writings and by sampling from her jurisprudence. The analysis shows that Justice McLachlin’s decision making was driven by an internal dialectic that distilled the law’s “complex majesty” that balanced the rule of law’s legality and empathy’s humanity through a process of studied and disciplined flexibility. In essence, what Justice McLachlin practised was the art of contextualized judging. And what emerged through this process of internal dialectic was less a substantive theory of justice than a manner of decision making that represented its own distinctive, and even singular, conception of justice. Reflecting on a jurisprudence that includes breakthrough decisions and unforgettable moments, the article concludes nonetheless that Justice McLachlin’s legacy consists more truly in her decision making than in the decisions she made.
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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.003 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".