The Immunity of the Attorney General to Law Society Discipline
Bibliographic record
Abstract
English Abstract: The Attorney General is both the minister responsible to the legislature for oversight of the law society and a practicing member of the law society. This dual status raises important questions: Is the Attorney General subject to discipline by the law society? Should she be? This article argues that the Attorney General is immune, absent bad faith, both for prosecutorial discretion and core policy advice and decisions, as well as absolutely immune under parliamentary privilege for anything said in the legislature. The Attorney General enjoys no special immunity otherwise, i.e. for the practice of law outside prosecutorial discretion and for policy and political functions outside core policy advice and decisions. (The Attorney General for Ontario enjoys extended immunity under a statutory provision that is unique to that province.) The article then argues that the Attorney General should generally be subject to discipline to enhance the rule of law and the protection of the public. If some immunity is necessary, that immunity should require good faith.\nFrench Abstract: La procureure générale est à la fois la ministre responsable de la surveillance du barreau par le pouvoir législatif et un membre du barreau qui exerce. Ce double statut soulève des questions importantes. La procureure générale est-elle passible de sanctions disciplinaires imposées par le barreau? Devrait-elle l’être? L’auteur de cet article soutient que la procureure générale bénéficie d’une immunité, sauf dans les cas de mauvaise foi de sa part, tant en ce qui concerne le pouvoir discrétionnaire de poursuivre que les conseils et décisions de base en matière de politique. Elle jouit toutefois d’une immunité absolue en vertu du secret parlementaire concernant tout ce qui se dit en l’enceinte parlementaire. Par ailleurs, la procureure générale ne jouit d’aucune autre immunité particulière quant à l’exercice du droit hors de ses fonctions discrétionnaires de procureure générale et quant à ses pouvoirs de conseil et de décision liés aux politiques hors de ses fonctions de base en pareille matière. (La procureure générale de l’Ontario jouit d’une immunité élargie en vertu d’une disposition législative propre à cette province.) L’auteur de l’article soutient ensuite que la procureure générale devrait, de façon générale, pouvoir faire l’objet de sanctions disciplinaires afin d’améliorer la primauté du droit et la protection du public. Si un certain degré d’immunité est requis, cette immunité devrait avoir la bonne foi pour condition.
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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 | 0.034 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| 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".