The Use of American Precedents in Canadian Courts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1849, the Supreme Court of New Brunswick faced the issue of whether there was a public right to float logs on navigable streams. Not surprisingly, no general right was found in the English common law as large scale floating of lumber down rivers did not exist in England. “Yet in a young country like Canada, the right to float logs and timber was an economic necessity in many areas and some device had to be found to make the activity legal.” To find that legal device, the New Brunswick court turned to the United States, specifically to Maine, and adopted the principle of floatability from Wadsworth v. Smith . At a time when there was both necessity and shared circumstances, Canadian courts referred to Maine's experience for guidance. One hundred and thirty-five years later, in 1984, the New Brunswick Court of Queen's Bench faced the question of who had ownership of land that was restored after a dam on a river was removed. Again, experience in Maine was helpful. Bradley v. Rice indicated that the ownership rule applicable to normal rivers and streams also applied to artificial ponds created by expanding a stream by means of a dam, and the rule was applied in New Brunswick. One would think such examples of regional borrowing would have occurred frequently. This is particularly so because most of English Canada began with the influx of the Loyalists who were on the losing side of the American Revolution. United States statutes were freely adopted in the new colonies, and many of the early lawyers and judges had American training. Nonetheless, this sort of regional interchange seemed to fall to the forces, however artificial in the largest sense, that direct our legal attention along national rather than regional lines. Thus, for further evidence of trans-border interaction, we must turn to the national stage, the subject of this paper.
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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 | 0.011 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.039 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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".