The Bedford Trilogy and the Shifting Foundations of Vertical Stare Decisis: Emancipation from Judicial Restraint?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The paper examines the evolution of stare decisis in English and Canadian common law and the reorientation of vertical stare decisis following the Bedford Trilogy, in which the Supreme Court of Canada refashioned the doctrine of vertical stare decisis and provided trial judges with additional leeway to depart from precedent in certain circumstances. Some legal scholars criticize the Bedford test for upsetting the balance between the role of trial courts to make findings of fact and that of appellate courts to review lower court decisions for legal errors. Others caution that the Bedford test could, among other things, incentivize the re-litigation of settled issues. A survey of lower court decisions shows that, at least in the early stages of the Bedford test’s application, these concerns are unfounded. Rather, lower courts predominantly continue to adhere to binding precedents in a principled manner, largely for two reasons: the threshold to invoke the Bedford test is reserved for exceptional cases and the SCC has offered limited direction on the circumstances warranting judicial intervention. These decisions demonstrate that lower courts require further direction on when they could and should apply the Bedford test. Without knowing when the factual record or circumstances have sufficiently shifted the parameters of debate, lower courts may feel ill-equipped to depart from binding precedents. The paper proposes a five-part framework lower courts could apply to determine with greater certainty when the requirements of the Bedford test are met.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.055 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".