A Wall Between the "Public" and the "Private": A Comment on Highwood Congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses (Judicial Committee) v Wall
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This case comment examines the Supreme Court of Canada’s recent decision in Highwood Congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses (Judicial Committee) v Wall. The court ruled that a church’s decision to excommunicate a member could not be judicially reviewed. Rather, judicial review is reserved for decisions by state actors. Wall narrows the scope of judicial review such that many quasi-public actors—such as sports administrators and political parties—are no longer subject to judicial review. The author argues that Wall’s prima facie simplification of the law of judicial review masks deeper conceptual and practical tensions. Specifically, by immunizing quasi-public actors—who are integral to the administrative state—from judicial review, Wall raises questions of accountability. Moreover, the spread of Charter values among such actors is potentially thwarted by this decision. Finally, what is more problematic is that in arriving at its approach to judicial review in Wall, the Supreme Court misinterpreted a helpful body of cases on the public–private distinction and further complicated the question of when judicial review is available to litigants.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.041 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.039 | 0.039 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".