Bibliographic record
Abstract
Soft law is a puzzle. It shapes a wide range of public decision making, but its contents are said to lie beyond the rule of law. This paper explores the largely uncharted terrain of soft law in Canada. It is organized in three parts. Part I examines the existing treatment of soft law in Canadian jurisprudence, including soft law’s relationship to administrative law concepts such as the standard of reasonableness and the Constitution. Part II proposes the foundations of a new framework to characterize soft law, termed the “spectrum approach.” This approach aims to assist courts in responding to the influence and variations of soft law in Canadian society, and to begin to assess soft law on its own terms, rather than in relation to other concepts. Finally, Part III applies the spectrum approach to a case study of Ontario university free speech policies. In sum, we argue that soft law is a powerful, practical force in Canadian society that should be subject to meaningful oversight by the courts.
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 | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.088 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".