The Effect of R. v. Morrison on Sexual Assault Law: Is the Reasonable Steps Requirement an Articulation of Mens Rea or a Statutory Bar on the Defence of Mistaken Belief?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Supreme Court of Canada’s interpretation of the reasonable steps requirement for the offence of child luring in R. v. Morrison has undermined the law of sexual assault. Appellate courts have applied Morrison to sexual assault cases, insisting that the fault element for sexual assault is purely subjective. Accordingly, these courts have held that the accused’s failure to take reasonable steps to ascertain consent does not inexorably prove the mens rea for sexual assault. This result undermines reforms to sexual assault law, creates needless analytical complexity, and violates the presumption of innocence. All of these deleterious results can be avoided if courts interpret the mens rea for sexual assault as a subjective-objective standard of fault. However, Morrison stands squarely in the way of this simple solution. The Supreme Court’s interpretation of the reasonable steps requirement in Morrison cannot be distinguished from the reasonable steps requirement for sexual assault. Furthermore, as a matter of horizontal stare decisis, the Supreme Court is unlikely to overturn Morrison despite its flaws.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot 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.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".