Book Review - The Tenth Justice: Judicial Appointments, Marc Nadon, and the Supreme Court Act Reference by Carissima Mathen & Michael Plaxton
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This short book review discusses The Tenth Justice: Judicial Appointments, Marc Nadon, and the Supreme Court Act Reference, by Professors Mathen and Plaxton. The “tenth justice” is Justice Marc Nadon, who was appointed from the Federal Court of Appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada. The appointment inspired the Supreme Court Reference and conclusion by a majority of the Court that their colleague – as Nadon was already sworn in – was not eligible to be appointed to one of Quebec’s three positions on the Court. The Tenth Justice offers an excellent, high-level primer on Justice Nadon’s appointment and its fallout, the pivotal questions of statutory interpretation at stake, the Reference decision – including Moldaver J.’s dissent – and the decision’s political, legal, and institutional aftermath – including Prime Minister Harper’s attack on then Chief Justice McLachlin. Scholarship spotlighting landmark Supreme Court decisions and extraordinary moments in institutional history is invaluable, and The Tenth Justice is recommended reading for scholars and students of Canadian constitutional law.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.031 | 0.020 |
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".