Bilingualism at the Supreme Court of Canada: Quantifying Citations to English, French, and Bilingual Doctrinal Sources
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Using statistical analysis, this chapter explores the language of doctrinal sources – such as books, law review articles, and governmental reports – that the Supreme Court of Canada cited in its private law decisions issued between 2000 and 2020 in the areas of tort, contract, and property law. More specifically, the analysis considers whether the Court cited doctrinal sources written in English, in French, or in both official languages. This chapter&s;s statistical analysis produced two important findings. First, in private law decisions that originated outside of Quebec and that cited five or more doctrinal sources, the Court rarely cited doctrinal sources written in French. In contrast, in cases that originated in Quebec and that cited five or more doctrinal sources, the Court more frequently cited doctrinal sources written in English. Second, private law decisions that originated in Quebec more frequently cite bilingual doctrinal sources compared to private law decisions that originated in the rest of Canada.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.076 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.032 | 0.050 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".