From the Ivory Tower to the Courtroom: Cooperative Federalism in the Supreme Court of Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article provides the first exhaustive quantitative account of the Supreme Court of Canada’s use of the term “cooperative federalism.” We find that cooperative federalism has appeared in twenty-four Supreme Court decisions from 1976 to 2019, and that these decisions have been more likely to favor the federal government than the provinces. Moreover, the Court’s use of the term can be divided between two distinct periods. During the formative period (1976–2009), the Court used the term fairly consistently. From 2010 to 2019, the Court has entered a contested period characterized by split decisions in which the Court is divided over differing conceptions of federalism. As cooperative federalism has transformed from a relatively vague concept into a more substantive constitutional principle, fissures over the term’s application have developed. This article shows how scholarly terminology can have an unexpected and even dispositive effect on judicial decisions, which can reflect uncertainty over how judges understand their institutional role.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".