Bibliographic record
Abstract
The only approach to statutory interpretation in Canada is Driedger’s Modern Principle, which instructs a court to harmoniously interpret the text, context, and purpose when determining the meaning of a statute. While the Modern Principle provides a valid starting point for statutory interpretation, it has been critiqued as failing to provide a coherent methodology. The question, therefore, turns to methodology and what a harmonious interpretation might mean. Recently, various authors across the fields of both ordinary statutory interpretation and constitutional interpretation have pointed to a new methodological approach coming from the Supreme Court of Canada, where the text holds interpretive weight such that highly abstract purposes do not outweigh text. The Supreme Court has called this approach “purposive textualism” and some academics have called it the “New Canadian Textualism.” The author explores the extent to which purposive textualism is compatible with Quebec’s codified civil law. Quebec is the only Canadian province to codify its law of general application, or jus commune, which invites the question of whether methods of statutory interpretation born from the common law or constitutional context are compatible with codal interpretation. Through an exploration of the mixed nature of Quebec civil law, history of statutory interpretation in the province, and the textual boundaries in Quebec’s codes, the author concludes that purposive textualism can be compatible with codal interpretation — particularly if the methodology accounts for the way a codal provision is drafted, which might cue the interpreter to look to its spirit.
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 | 0.006 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".