<i>Constraining the Court: Judicial Power and Policy Implementation in the Charter Era</i> , by James B. Kelly
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms is often seen as centralizing, shifting authority from provincial legislatures to federally appointed courts. James Kelly challenges this perception in his excellent new book. Using a policy implementation framework, Kelly asks whether legislatures actually implement Supreme Court rulings and whether judicial policy impact has been overstated in the Charter era. His thesis is that federalism counters the influence of judicial policymaking. Federalism, coupled with the Supreme Court’s dependence on other actors for implementation, allows governments to adjust decisions to fit local circumstances. The Charter’s centralizing policy impact is therefore overstated. This conclusion makes Constraining the Court a welcome Canadian complement to Gerald Rosenberg’s The Hollow Hope. Although equally as pessimistic about the judiciary’s policy impact, Kelly, unlike Rosenberg, attributes much of this to federalism. For scholars of federalism and multilevel governance, Kelly’s work shows that the complexity of Canada’s division of powers makes it hard for even the country’s highest court to ensure universal application of its decisions.
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 | 0.014 | 0.052 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.022 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".