“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.
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 | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| 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".