Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canadian courts treat foreign law as fact. When foreign law governs a dispute as a result of choice-of-law rules, the parties must plead and prove its contents, typically through expert testimony. The trial court assesses the evidence and applies the law, as it was proven, to the case at hand. But what happens when a litigant disagrees with the trial court’s view of foreign law and appeals its decision? Appellate courts do not interfere with findings of fact unless the trial judge made a palpable and overriding error. Conversely, appellate courts are free to impose their views on questions of law. Should appellate courts defer to the trial judge or get the final word on issues of foreign law? This article addresses the disagreement between appellate courts over this issue, which the Supreme Court of Canada dodged in a recent case. It delves into the complex features of foreign law, insisting on the distinction between its evidentiary treatment (as fact) and its nature and function in litigation (as law). It makes the case for a nuanced approach to the standard of review which accounts for the many ways in which problems of foreign law present themselves to the courts. As a result, appellate courts should characterize specific questions of foreign law as questions of fact or questions of law rather than attempting to pigeon-hole foreign law itself, an abstraction capable of being both. Ultimately, correctness and deference should coexist in the appellate review of foreign law findings.
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 | 0.030 | 0.089 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.015 | 0.011 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.008 |
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".