Assessing the Impact of Unilingualism at the Supreme Court of Canada: Panel Composition, Assertiveness, Caseload, and Deference
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper is a first empirical foray in the debate concerning mandatory bilingualism for Supreme Court judges in Canada. The paper summarizes the main arguments, discusses the framing of bilingualism as a “legal” or an “identity” requirement, and uses empirical data to assess whether unilingualism has had an impact on four dimensions of the decision-making process at the Supreme Court of Canada: panel composition, assertiveness, individual caseloads and deference towards lower courts by unilingual and bilingual judges. Our results suggest that there is a correlation between the fluency in French and the first three elements but that there is no difference in the level of deference across linguistic groups towards francophone lower courts. Even if the paper is exploratory in nature and warrants further research, the general picture that emerges is that language proficiency superimposes itself as another kind of legal specialization in the inner-working of the Court.
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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".