Sharing the Spotlight: Co-authored Reasons on the\nModern Supreme Court of Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When the Supreme Court of Canada delivers its reasons forjudgment, the normal expectation (the rare "By the Court" decision aside) is that the judgment of the Court-unanimous or majority or even plurality-will be designated as having been delivered by one specific judge. ("The reasons of A, B, C and D were delivered by B.") But in recent decades, the practice has developed for two or more judges to share this formal designation; co-authorships currently account for one judgment (and, for that matter one set of minority reasons) in every ten. This article explores this practice, unusual among comparable national high courts: when it started, which judges and which combinations of judges have been the most frequent participants, and what sorts of cases (type of law, size of panel, length of reasons) have tended to be involved; and it concludes by considering why this matters, and what it tells us about the evolving Court.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.025 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.034 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".