Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Theoretical accounts of legal causation have traditionally emerged from tort or criminal law scholarship, only occasionally surfacing in commentary on constitutional law. Given their potential to migrate across jurisdictions and influence debates globally, the role of causation is apt to become a distinctive field of inquiry in comparative constitutional theory. Yet there have been few attempts to draw comparisons between jurisdictions or to formulate general theoretical principles capable of unifying the variegated global instances of causation in public law. The Supreme Court of Canada recently rendered two high-profile decisions involving disputes under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in which questions of causation featured prominently, and just as there has been a dearth of comparative scholarly coverage of causation in constitutional law, there has been little written on the concept of causation in Canadian constitutional law. In this article, I address these lacunae in the hope of stimulating new conversations in a fledgling field of inquiry. To do so, I introduce a novel methodological device for interpreting statements about causation in judicial opinions in constitutional cases that I call “exposition.” This device instructs us to scrutinize a court’s seemingly factual causal conclusion in a constitutional judgment—for example, that an impugned law causes a breach of constitutional rights—and peel back the factual veneer to expose the more basic normative claim about justice or public policy that the court tacitly endorses while encoding it within the factual claim. I illustrate exposition by invoking it to draw out insights from recent Canadian decisions involving causation. But its availability for a diverse range of purposes when thinking about the role of causation in constitutional law is the broader lesson for comparative scholars that I seek to develop.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.042 | 0.008 |
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".