Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article considers the content of the unwritten principle of democracy and its potential relevance in Canadian constitutional interpretation. The unwritten principles of federalism, the rule of law and constitutionalism, democracy, and the protection of minorities set out by the Supreme Court of Canada in the Secession Reference have received extensive academic attention. Much yet remains unknown, however, about the democracy principle. This article argues that we should interpret the unwritten principle as embodying a “thin” or procedural account of democracy tied to meaningful participation, rather than a “thick” version imposing specific outcomes or broader obligations. I argue that whatever the weight of a “thick” account of democracy, a “thin” understanding is preferable for filling in the content of a constitutional principle that has legal force. The central critiques of the use of unwritten principles in constitutional interpretation are 1) that they lack legitimacy and 2) that they are incoherent in relation to one another. Operationalizing a thin version of democracy in constitutional interpretation responds better to the claims that the unwritten principles lack legitimacy or are incoherent. A thin account still permits the unwritten principle to carry out its functional role in constitutional interpretation, such as enabling courts to fill in gaps in the text or to engage in structural reasoning. The article considers the implications of this approach for referendums and municipal elections.
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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.011 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".