Reforming the Supreme Court Appointment Process, 2004-2014: A 10-Year Democratic Audit
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper analyzes the Supreme Court appointment process over the 10-year period from 2004 through the end of 2013. The paper conducts a democratic audit of the Supreme Court appointment process, not an evaluation of the judges appointed through this process. The paper first presents a short history of the Supreme Court appointments process between 2004 and 2013. It sets out the mechanisms under which each of the eight judicial appointments was made during this period. Next, it introduces the concept of a democratic audit and identifies the drivers of change to the appointments process. It argues that prior to 1992 proposed reforms to the Supreme Court amendment process were motivated by concerns about federalism: incorporating a role for the provinces in the appointment process. However, after the failure of the Charlottetown Accord (1992), the motivation changed and reform of the Supreme Court appointment process became part of a democratic reform agenda proposed first by the opposition Reform Party, the n by Liberal leader Paul Martin, both in his leadership campaign and during his tenure as Prime Minister, and finally by the Conservative Party led by Prime Minister Stephen Harper. This part of the paper also addresses an issue that did not factor into the reforms — any perceived deficiency in the quality of past appointments or concerns about the legitimacy of the Supreme Court itself. Since 1992, the key factors articulated as the basis for changing the appointment process have been (1) transparency; (2) accountability; and (3) public knowledge about the Supreme Court and its judges. These are the factors used for evaluation through this democratic audit. The next part of the paper conducts the democratic audit and finds that the reforms have largely failed to deliver the promised transparency and accountability. Conversely, the reforms have been very successful in serving a public education function about the Supreme Court and its work. The paper the n offers recommendations for “reforming the reforms” in order to achieve the goals of transparency and accountability in the appointment process, arguing that the government should publish a detailed protocol which would set out the qualifications, consultation to be followed, procedure for evaluation, etc. The paper also proposes a revamped advisory committee which would operate in a more open and transparent fashion and produce a report on its work. The public hearings of nominees should continue, but only if the Minister of Justice also
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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 | 0.033 | 0.091 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".