What’s Wrong with (Some) Judges?<i>Carter</i>and the Invention of a Right to ‘Physician-Assisted Dying’
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This chapter argues that, in addition to rights-fundamentalism, another problem lies in the ‘progressive’ zeal, which moves some judges to exploit the room for creativity granted by abstract concepts, in order to invent novel rights. This, too, is imprudent in having courts, rather than elected legislatures, decide ethical issues that are politically controversial. The argument develops through an examination of Carter v. Canada, the 2015 judgement of Canada’s Supreme Court, which decided that an absolute prohibition of ‘physician-assisted dying’ violated the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The chapter concludes that Carter shows that charters that include unspecified rights generate several problems: they give judges no determinate guidance in deciding cases; they purport to exist before their limits have been set in relation to competing rights, whereas a right’s existence cannot be known until competing claims have been considered; and they afford judges vast room for the exercise of philosophical discretion, in which they lack professional expertise or authority. In addition, there are also problems with the views of the interpretation of rights: that judges have privileged insight into what ‘real rights’ are; and that they are not simply interpreters but developers of law, responsible for keeping it abreast of ‘progressive’ social mores. These views incline judges to overlook the natural myopia of their case-focused attention, the limitations of courts in achieving a comprehensive view of social facts, judges’ lack of accountability for the policy effects of their decisions, and their relative immunity from direct challenge by diverse viewpoints.
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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 | 0.025 | 0.058 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.040 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.012 | 0.019 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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".