Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purposive interpretation leads a double life. As a matter of constitutional practice, it forms the doctrine through which courts in Canada and around the world determine the concrete protections that abstract constitutional rights afford. However, as a matter of constitutional theory, purposive interpretation is routinely rejected as either an empty phrase that offers no alternative to established theories of constitutional interpretation or a dangerous doctrine that provides no basis for distinguishing between justified and unjustified interpretations of constitutional rights. This essay formulates a conception of purposive interpretation that is not vulnerable to these objections. The purposive approach to the interpretation of constitutional rights follows from a set of ideas about how legal interpretation differs from interpretation more broadly, how constitutional interpretation differs from interpretation in other legal domains, and how constitutional interpretation constrains both the purposes it attributes to particular provisions and the application of those purposes to particular contexts. My aim is to show that these ideas fit together in a coherent doctrinal whole that is neither empty nor dangerous. Purposive interpretation is not empty because it offers a genuine alternative to the presuppositions and structure of opposing interpretive paradigms. Purposive interpretation is not dangerous because it provides a principled set of resources for distinguishing between justified and unjustified interpretations.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.039 | 0.050 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.083 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.036 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.002 |
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".