The Elusive Quest for French on the Bench: Bilingualism Scores for Canadian Supreme Court Justices, 1985–2013
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article explores normative arguments for mandatory judicial bilingualism. It disentangles the links between the normative reasons advanced for mandatory bilingualism and the correlative level of French that should be expected of judges. To provide empirical anchoring, we construct a bilingualism score of Canadian Supreme Court justices composed of four indicators. The score shows that non-systematic assessments used so far like self-assessments, parliamentary hearings and media coverage are not reliable instruments to predict the level of use of French on the Supreme Court. Also, the score suggests that institutional dynamics have an impact worth studying in more depth. Ultimately, the measurement of functional bilingualism depends first on which linguistic capacity is being measured. This, in turn, depends on the normative reasons supporting the requirement of functional bilingualism. Instead of asking whether French should be mandatory upon appointment, it might be more productive to ask how much French should be required.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".