Bibliographic record
Abstract
Among the many opportunities for a lasting legacy for the newly minted majority Harper government, the appointment of a majority of members of the Supreme Court of Canada may be the most significant. In addition to two existing Harper appointments and the two that are imminent, at least three more sitting justices will reach mandatory retirement at 75 during the next four years. In the Canadian constitutional framework, the Supreme Court of Canada plays a lead role in guaranteeing the basic rights of Canadians and providing a check against any abuses of power at either the legislative or executive (bureaucratic) levels. Even before the adoption of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982, this country’s courts have been important players on the Canadian scene in upholding the rule of law, keeping administrators in check, and interpreting the division of powers between the federal and provincial levels of government, as articulated in the Constitution Act, 1867. Giving shape to the broad language of the 1982 Charter has expanded the judicial role and raised the profile of the judicial branch of the Canadian state – especially the Supreme Court of Canada. Prime Minister Stephen Harper went on record in a 2000 opinion piece he wrote for The Globe and Mail as being concerned about “biased ‘judicial activism’ and its extremes,” as well as the “serious flaws” in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. He has repeated these concerns in a more muted form since assuming office in 2006, and has described the appropriate judicial temperament as one that is respectful of the elected legislative role and one that is balanced – restrained – in the interpretation of rights. Concerns about what stamp Harper might put on the Supreme Court should focus on this question of judicial temperament and style, rather than ideology or blatant political partisanship. While matters of ideology and politics may still have some sway in lower-level court and administrative tribunal appointments, Harper is too shrewd a politician and too subtle a strategist to make blatant partisan or ideological appointments at the increasingly scrutinized Supreme Court appointment process.
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 | 0.008 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.040 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.021 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.003 |
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".