A unified model of public law: Charter values and reasonableness review in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Supreme Court of Canada concluded in its 2012 judgment in Doré that the rational connection test and the less restrictive means inquiry from the Oakes analysis are not useful when assessing the justifiability of administrative decisions limiting Charter rights. The Court instead articulated a ‘robust’ conception of proportionality that requires administrative decision makers to demonstrate only that any rights limitations that their decisions impose are proportionate ‘in the strict sense.’ This article argues that Charter values should be understood as part of a normative hierarchy of ‘justificatory resources’ to which administrative decision makers can refer in justifying rights-limiting decisions as proportionate in the strict sense. It argues further that the robust, reasons-first conception of reasonableness that the Court described in Vavilov affirms Doré’s logical architecture, marking a shift in Canadian jurisprudence toward a ‘culture of justification.’ In adopting the same approach to constitutional decisions affecting Charter rights and administrative decisions that do not engage the Charter, Doré and Vavilov construct a unified model of public law in which all public decisions must be shown to be justified by their congruence with a hierarchy of norms which has Charter values at its apex. In this unified model of public law, in which a robust conception of reasonableness is central, it is not clear what room, or need, is left for correctness review.
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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 | 0.013 | 0.028 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".