“Blackstoned” Again: Common Law Liberties, the Canadian Constitution, and the Principles of Fundamental Justice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this Article, I argue that the Supreme Court of Canada's location of the principles of fundamental justice among the basic tenets of our legal system-and nowhere else-aligns the Court with particular aspects of the eighteenth century jurist William Blackstone's thoughts. The jurisprudential part of Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765) is premised upon a faith in the existence of fundamental principles that must be assumed to underlie the common law. As reflections of these principles, common law rules deserve deference, even though the principles themselves are not clear. I argue that, whatever else may be said in favour of Blackstone's ideas about the common law, this perspective provides an inappropriate tool for the analysis of the provisions of the Charter in general, and fundamental justice in Section 7 in particular. I argue that Blackstonian analysis is an inductive, conservative technique that is in direct tension with the deductive, potentially progressive version of strong modern human rights theory, which explains the need for constitutionally entrenched bills of rights such as the Charter.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".