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Record W4416019422 · doi:10.21991/cf29503

The Constitutional Status of Overbreadth: A Reply to Professor Stewart

2025· article· W4416019422 on OpenAlexaffvenue
Colton Fehr

Bibliographic record

VenueConstitutional Forum / Forum constitutionnel · 2025
Typearticle
Language
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicJudicial and Constitutional Studies
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Saskatchewan
Fundersnot available
KeywordsJurisprudenceNorm (philosophy)Argument (complex analysis)Supreme courtConstitutional lawCharter

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The Supreme Court’s jurisprudence constitutionalizing overbreadth as a principle of fundamental justice under section 7 of the Charter adopted two understandings of the norm. The first conception operates in a “strict” sense wherein any effect of a law that is disconnected from its objective renders the law overbroad. The second conception applies in a “relaxed” manner by prohibiting any application of a law that overshoots its objective more than reasonably necessary. Hamish Stewart’s recent contribution to the literature agrees with and builds upon my prior argument that the strict version of the norm fails to qualify as a principle of fundamental justice. He nevertheless asserts that the relaxed norm ought to maintain its constitutional status. There are, however, two reasons to question this conclusion. First, the relaxed version is highly indeterminate as what is “reasonably necessary” to meet a legislature’s objective provides no concrete restraint on judges declaring laws violative of the Charter. Second, the relaxed norm does not attract adequate consensus as a principle of fundamental justice. Instead, overbreadth in this form operates as a “gross disproportionality light” that effectively crowds out the more intuitive principle of justice that laws must not impose grossly disproportionate effects.

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 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)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.007
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow), Science and technology studies
Consensus categoriesScience and technology studies
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.975
Threshold uncertainty score0.999

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.007
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0020.001
Bibliometrics0.0010.004
Science and technology studies0.0170.100
Scholarly communication0.0010.001
Open science0.0020.001
Research integrity0.0010.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.023
GPT teacher head0.307
Teacher spread0.284 · 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

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.

Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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