Justice As Harmony: The Distinct Resonance of Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin's Juridical Genius
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Chief Justice McLachlin’s juridical work has earned special praise, but what specifically distinguishes it among the work of other leading jurists has proven elusive for lawyers and social scientists to identify. My experience as a law clerk to McLachlin CJC suggested a distinct approach never comprehensively articulated, but intuitively well-known and widely-emulated among those in her sphere of influence. Drawing on the Chief Justice’s public lectures—where she often explained and offered deeper reflection on the McLachlin Court’s defining jurisprudence—I make the case in this article that at the heart of that approach is a quality best described as the pursuit of harmonious resolution of legal problems. After noting the pervasive association of the concept of harmony with the just order in many cultures across the world and over history, the article explains how harmony can be used, complementarily with legal rules, as an aim in adjudication. As a relationship among elements of a system and the whole that they comprise, it offers a way of leveraging accepted legal principles and their aim of just order in order to address the insufficiencies of the rules that reveal themselves through legal disputes. In search of that relationship, harmony necessarily engages process, committing the judge to working out how to give collective effect to the multiple legitimate considerations invoked by the problem, and thus resolve the legal system-disharmony revealed by a case. Striving for consensus, accommodation, and reconciliation are among such methods often said to be favoured by McLachlin CJC over alternatives that perceive problems through the simplistic lens of either-or-type conflicts. The article surveys how Chief Justice McLachlin’s work characteristically evinces this quality of pursuing justice as harmony. Based on McLachlin CJC’s remarkable success, as well as novel social conditions arising contemporaneously with her career, the article concludes by asking whether this approach may hold wider promise.
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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 | 0.018 | 0.028 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.062 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.025 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.016 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".