New Wine in Old Bottles: Corrupt Contracts in Canadian Private Law
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Canadian criminal law on foreign corruption recently experienced great upheaval, as Canada worked to bring its legislation up to international standards following years of inadequate substantive law and lackadaisical prosecutions. Canadian private law, by contrast, has remained highly stable on paper, but longstanding doctrines have been effectively applied to modern, internationalized forms of corruption. The chapter begins with an overview of the general criminal law doctrines relating to corruption, then discusses the Corruption of Foreign Public Officials Act and its application in practice, including the first conviction of an individual under the Act in 2013. It then turns to private law, surveying the tort and equitable remedies available to victims of corruption, and finally the contract law doctrines applicable to corrupt contracts. Since Canada is a mixed jurisdiction, the chapter contains an internal comparative element. The Canadian common law and Quebec approaches are compared, and revealed to be more similar than one might expect. Modern Canadian common law tort and equitable remedies, and the corresponding provisions of the Code civil du Quebec, provide a range of means by which both direct and indirect victims of corruption can recover compensatory damages. They also serve social objectives by providing for disgorgement of corruptly-acquired gains in most cases. The contract law doctrines relating to illegality and agency have become more flexible over time, so as to permit courts to enforce or not enforce contracts or severable parts of contracts as justice dictates.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
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".