Measuring Judicial Activism on the Supreme Court of Canada: A Comment on Newfoundland (Treasury Board) v. Newfoundland Association of Public Employees
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the recent The public debate over judicial activism and the role of an unelected judiciary with respect to public policy in light of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms has missed an important point of engagement: whether or not the empirical claims of Chartercritics are an accurate depiction of the Court’s behaviour when faced with the possibility of striking down a “majoritarian” decision. The authors set out four hypotheses and test them: (1) the Supreme Court strikes down majoritarian legislation often; (2) judicial activism is increasing over time; (3) judicial activism is largely the product of the Court’s Charter analysis under section 1; and (4) the Charter’s legislative override under section 33 has been deligitimized. Ultimately, each of the four hypotheses is contradicted by the data: the government wins the overwhelming majority of constitutional challenges brought to majoritarian decisions; judicial activism has not increased over time; the government’s success rate in the section 1 analysis is highly dependent on whether or not an internal limit is imposed on a protected right; and the level of judicial activism has not increased as a response to the deligitimaization of the section 33 override. Before the debate on the propriety of judicial activism proceeds any farther, more quantitative legal research should be conducted to determine whether or not the Court is actually activist.
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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 | 0.014 | 0.057 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.043 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.015 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 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".