Advisory opinions, juridical mischief and Canada’s contribution to the law of statehood
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canada is one of the few counties where the use of advisory opinions approaches that of the international level. The country’s most famous advisory is the 1998 Quebec Secession Reference, which became an authoritative source for international law on statehood and secession. It also showcases the peculiarities of the practice and offers lessons about the operations of law at its conceptual extremes. Because it required Canada’s Supreme Court to recast the country’s history and constitutionalism it shows how juridical mischief can be the wellspring of creativity and why the advisory opinion is the instrument par excellence for its introduction. Martti Koskenniemi finds similar narratives of false coherence and unresolved resolution are a hallmark of international law, suggesting a transnational pattern. John Borrows believes these patterns already shape Canada’s unresolved colonial constitutionalism and suggests they can also rehabilitate it.
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 | 0.007 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.036 | 0.040 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".