Is Originalism Bad for Women? the Curious Case of Canada's "Equal Rights Amendment."
Bibliographic record
Abstract
EnglishOriginalism is a body of theories about constitutional interpretation that gained popularity in the United States in the 1980s. These theories maintain that the meaning of constitutional provisions is fixed at the time of framing and ratification and that the popularly understood meaning of the words at that time (or the original intentions of the drafters) is authoritative. While originalism purports to have a positivist orientation, some American scholars have argued that it is mere subterfuge for conservative judicial activism and is better understood as a populist rhetorical practice that has invigorated radical, conservative political movements. This article argues that feminist theorists should reconsider their outright dismissal of originalist theories as deleterious for women’s rights, and instead conduct a deeper analysis that weighs their as-yet unexplored potential benefits against the well-documented risks, using the example of section 28 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is a case in point. The application of originalist principles, at least for the interpretation of section 28, is critical step in moving women towards having truly equal access to Charter rights. francaisL'originalisme est un ensemble de theories portant sur l'interpretation constitutionnelle qui gagna en popularite aux Etats-Unis dans les annees 1980. Selon ces theories, la signification des dispositions constitutionnelles est arretee au moment de la formulation et de la ratification et la signification communement accordee aux mots a l'epoque (ou les intentions initiales des redacteurs) fait autorite. Bien que l'originalisme pretende avoir une orientation positiviste, certains chercheurs etats-uniens ont soutenu qu'il s'agit d'un simple subterfuge pour l'activisme judiciaire conservateur et il est mieux compris comme une pratique de rhetorique populiste ayant revigore des mouvements politiques conservateurs radicaux. L'auteur de cet article soutient que les theoriciens feministes devraient reconsiderer leur rejet categorique des theories originalistes comme nuisible aux droits des femmes et mener plutot une analyse plus approfondie mettant en balance les avantages eventuels jusqu'alors inexplores et les risques solidement documentes a l'aide de l'article 28 de la Charte canadienne des droits et libertes comme exemple typique. L'application de principes originalistes, du moins pour l'interpretation de l'article 28, est un pas critique pour mener les femmes vers l'obtention d'un acces veritablement egal aux droits garantis par la Charte.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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".