Taking Comparative Law Seriously: Rethinking the Supreme Court of Canada's Modern Approach to Statutory Interpretation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the Supreme Court of Canada's use of foreign law in statutory interpretation cases over a period of five years to better understand when, how, and why foreign law is used. The study reveals that the Supreme Court of Canada regularly cites foreign legal sources in deciding cases turning on questions relating to the interpretation of domestic legislation. However, because of the inconsistent use of foreign law by the Supreme Court of Canada in statutory interpretation cases, this paper argues that the legitimacy of citing foreign law would be enhanced by adopting a principled approach. Through a modest reform to the Supreme Court of Canada's 'modern approach' to statutory interpretation, Canadian courts could fully realize the value of the foreign experience on similar problems of interpretation. In doing so, Canadian courts would take comparative law seriously and enhance its legitimacy as part of the judicial reasoning process in appropriate cases.
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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 | 0.022 | 0.044 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.035 | 0.047 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.023 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.015 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".