Constitutional Theory and The<i>Quebec Secession Reference</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The judgment of the Supreme Court of Canada in the Quebec Secession Reference has produced a torrent of public commentary. Given the fundamental issues about the relationship between law and politics raised by the judgment, what is remarkable is that that commentary has remained almost entirely in a pragmatic perspective, which asks how positive politics entered into the motivations and justifications of the Court, and looks at the results in terms of their political consequences, without deep or sustained reflection on the ultimate grounds for the role the Court took upon itself, or on the normative sources of its reasoning. In this article, we explore the Quebec Secession Reference through the lens of constitutional theory. In particular, we highlight three unconventional aspects of the Court’s reasoning: (a) the supplementation of the written constitution through an explicit process of amendment-like interpretation to craft a new legal framework governing the secession of a province from Canada, (b) the vesting by the Court of substantial, if not exclusive responsibility for interpreting the constitutional rules on secession in particular situations or contexts with political organs, not the courts, and (c) the ascent by the court to abstract normativity, in articulating a normative vision of the Canadian constitutional order, whence it derived the legal framework governing secession. In addition to drawing attention to these unusual aspects of the judgment, we articulate the theoretical justifications that both explain and justify those features of the judgment, and identify issues for future discussion.
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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 teacher head, 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".