The Judicial Diplomacy of the Supreme Court of Canada and its Impact: An Empirical Overview
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Courts and judges across the globe, including the Supreme Court of Canada, are actively engaged in a metaphorical “dialogue” through the exchange of their judicial decisions. Is it the only type of communication happening among courts and judges? This empirical study, centred on interviews with ten current and former justices of the Supreme Court and nonpublic archival documents, shows that courts have established regular bilateral relationships with foreign counterparts, participate in multilateral transnational judicial associations and organizations, and have occasional contacts with other foreign courts, which I call “judicial diplomacy.” In addition to these institutional court-to-court relationships, the transnational judicial conversation occurs also between individual justices. Judges play a key role in such transnational conversations and exchanges. This article reveals that former and current justices of the Supreme Court interact with foreign and international judges not only within official meetings of the Supreme Court, or as part of the Supreme Court’s delegation, but also individually through several mechanisms. The bilateral or multilateral foreign relationships of the Supreme Court, whether as an institution or through individual justices, should not be considered informal or unimportant as they have demonstrable effects. It is through these meetings that they exchange views on their decisions and generate substantive, procedural, and court management ideas, often turning these ideas into action, such as establishing global and regional judicial networks, judicial training institutions, or electronic networks. Ultimately, the data of this research demonstrates that this dialogue with foreign counterparts also have a broader impact on Canada’s global reputation and foreign policy.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.026 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.012 | 0.026 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".