Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Despite apparent agreement on the approach to the interpretation of statutes in Canada, a system of limited parliamentary sovereignty, judges differ on a fundamental point: how purpose is used in interpretation. Some judges craft arguments that view the text as the medium through which the legislature expresses its intention, using purpose to shed light on the meaning of the text in defined ways (‘text-as-medium’ interpretation). Others see the background purposes or values of the statutory context as binding constraints in a coherent legal order, with text as merely a signal to meaning (‘purpose-as-medium’ interpretation). This paper argues that text-as-medium interpretation offers the most persuasive account of the use of purpose in interpretation, especially in a system of legislative sovereignty, which constrains interpretive choice. By bringing to light the commitments of these two interpretive arguments in the Canadian context for the first time, the paper also raises deeper normative questions about how to view legislation in a Westminster parliamentary democracy. These questions are fundamental to the relationship between sovereign legislatures and courts.
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 | 0.034 | 0.052 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.080 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".