Four Flaws: Reflections on the Canadian Approach to Private International Law
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Summary This article traces the evolution of the Canadian approach to private international law from Morguard Investments Ltd. v. De Savoye to Castillo v. Castillo and identifies four major flaws that have significant implications for both private international law and Canadian federalism: (1) ambiguous and inconsistent terminology that undermines the conceptual foundation of this approach while obscuring its potential impact; (2) the Court’s use of American conflict of laws jurisprudence to reinforce a deferential orientation in Canadian private international law; (3) the Court’s vision of the international order and understanding of public international law, which has begun to affect the Canadian federal system; and (4) the model of the Canadian Constitution employed in these cases, which may have broad negative consequences for provincial interests. The article argues that these flaws are remediable, that both constitutional text and recent opinions contain resources useful to this end, and that, however the Court decides to address these problems, subsequent iterations of the Canadian approach to private international law should emphasize clarity, consistency, and comprehensiveness.
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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 | 0.009 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.035 | 0.038 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".