On Statutory Interpretation and the (Canadian) Rule of Law: Interpretive Presumptions as Boundary Setting
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article brings together debates in statutory interpretation, the rule of law, and legal interpretation. Examining theoretical accounts of the rule of law, the article incorporates a greater attention to questions of interpretivism and the historical context of the interpreter in order to give contextual content to the rule of law. Construing rule of law in terms of fundamental questions about legal interpretation (e.g., discretion, determinacy, objectivity), the article proposes viewing rule of law as a bounded claim space in order to front the boundaries of that space as focal points for rule of law analysis. Reviewing various presumptions of statutory interpretation in Canadian jurisprudence, the article suggests that these presumptions are proxies for the boundary conditions that define, demarcate, and delimit a distinctively Canadian rule of law tradition, thereby showcasing the analytic heft and limited scope of rule of law analysis.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.010 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.094 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 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".