MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W4385518178 · doi:10.60082/2563-8505.1090

Some Thoughts on Appellate Advocacy in Constitutional Cases

2006· article· en· W4385518178 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
R. Geoff Richards

Bibliographic record

VenueSupreme Court law review · 2006
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicAmerican Constitutional Law and Politics
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsPolitical scienceLawConstitutional rightPsychologyLaw and economicsSociologyConstitution

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

I was told that my friend Professor Jamie Cameron would be introducing me today.That caused me to reflect on the year she and I clerked together at the Supreme Court.As Jamie mentioned, I worked for Justice Ronald Martland.At the time, he was the ranking puisne judge.By virtue of his seniority, he had the premium corner office: very spacious, high ceiling, over-stuffed red leather furniture, wood-panelled walls.As I recall, he had only two things on those walls.The first was cheaply framed a picture of his wife.The second, prominently displayed, was a New Yorker style cartoon.I liked that cartoon a good deal and thought it quite wonderful that a judge who had been on the Supreme Court of Canada for over 20 years would hang it in his office.When I was appointed to the Court of Appeal, I decided to copy Justice Martland.It took considerable effort to track down the cartoon but I was ultimately successful.It now sits proudly on a shelf in my office where it can't be missed.It features two very ordinary looking middle-aged men in business suits.One of them is saying to the other "You know Ralph, this daily metamorphosis never ceases to amaze me.Around home I'm a perfect idiot.I can't do anything right.But I come to work, put on a black robe, get behind the bench and by God I'm it!"I can assure you that the first part of that observation is correctaround home I am not infrequently a perfect idiot.Moreover, I suppose that if I receive many more introductions as generous as Jamie's, I just might begin to think I'm "it" as well and thereby live out the full scope of Justice Martland's cartoon.As many of you will know, the most famous lines in the literature on advocacy are the ones used by American lawyer John W. Davis over 65 years ago.He compared lawyers to fly fishermen.The lawyer's  Mr. Justice Robert G. Richards, Court of Appeal for Saskatchewan. 1 John W. Davis, "The Argument of an Appeal" (1940) 26 A.B.A.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.041
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.066
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Commentary · Consensus signal: Commentary
Teacher disagreement score0.052
Threshold uncertainty score0.218

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0410.066
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.002
Bibliometrics0.0040.006
Science and technology studies0.0240.053
Scholarly communication0.0310.040
Open science0.0060.009
Research integrity0.0520.028
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0180.002

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.

Opus teacher head0.033
GPT teacher head0.327
Teacher spread0.295 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreCommentary

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2006
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venueSupreme Court law reviewSame topicAmerican Constitutional Law and PoliticsFrench-language works237,207