Deconstructing City of Toronto: Unwritten Constitutional Principles and Responsive Judicial Review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article distinguishes between two conceptions of unwritten constitutional principles, which it refers to as the uncrossable thresholds and symbiotic conceptions. It examines the way that the Supreme Court of Canada engaged with these different conceptions in its 2021 City of Toronto judgment, suggesting that while the Court explicitly rejected the use of unwritten principles as uncrossable thresholds, it implicitly relied on a form of symbiotic principled analysis to reach that conclusion. Far from blunting the potential legal force of unwritten constitutionalism — which is what the Court evidently thought it was doing — I argue that this mode of analysis, insofar as it depends on a contextualized act of judicial balancing, leaves the door ajar for judicial invalidation of laws that are grievously out of step with key tenets of the Canadian constitutional order. In the article’s final section, I then argue that the Court’s methodology has the added benefit of creating space for what Rosalind Dixon characterizes as responsive judicial review, a form of review that gives courts a limited but vital role in correcting pathologies of the democratic process.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".