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Record W4401019486 · doi:10.29173/alr2778

Applying Purposive Textualism to Quebec's Codes

2024· article· en· W4401019486 on OpenAlex
Nicole Spadotto

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

venuePublished in a venue whose home country is Canada.
aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueAlberta Law Review · 2024
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicLegal Language and Interpretation
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsStatutory interpretationInterpretation (philosophy)Statutory lawLawStatuteContext (archaeology)Supreme courtMeaning (existential)OriginalismLegislative historyPolitical scienceSociologyEpistemologyHistoryPhilosophyLinguistics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

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.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.978
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.002

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 head0.015
GPT teacher head0.345
Teacher spread0.330 · 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