Administrative “Determinations of Law” and the Limits of Legal Pluralism after Vavilov
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As the doctrine of judicial review has matured, Canadian courts have become increasingly attuned to the role that administrative agencies play in maintaining the rule of law. The courts have recognized that in order for administrative agencies to function effectively, they must have some freedom to interpret their statutes. Accommodation of nonjudicial interpretations of law, however, has limits. While the courts have often addressed jurisdictional limits in Diceyan terms, they have also addressed the structural limitations that flow from the nature of delegated discretion. These limitations make it impossible for administrative agencies to make determinations of law as courts do. Most agencies do not have the power to create binding policy or otherwise resolve ambiguities in their enabling statute. Rule of law concerns may arise from the resulting uncertainty as much as from questions of vires. Administrative agencies are unable to settle constitutional questions, questions of central importance to the legal system, or jurisdictional disputes between agencies. Settling ambiguity in existing law is a function that only the courts can perform. Nonetheless, the legitimacy of law-making by nonjudicial institutions within their limits has long been recognized in the common law world. This article describes the development of legal pluralism regarding the sources of law in Canadian jurisprudence. The article then examines the extent to which Vavilov’s new framework for reasonableness review articulates how nonjudicial decision-makers might manifest the rule of law within a “culture of justification.”
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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 | 0.010 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".