Redressing the Imbalances: Rethinking the Judicial Role After <i>R. v. R.D.S.</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The decision of the Supreme Court of Canada in R. v. R.D.S. dealt with whether a trial judge's comments, about the interactions between police officers and "non-white groups", gave rise to a reasonable apprehension of bias in the circumstances. They strongly criticize the contrary ruling of the dissent as inappropriately drawing a false dichotomy between decisions based on evidence and decisions based on evidence and decision based on generalizations, and as improperly ignoring social context with an unwarranted confidence in the ideology of colour blindness. While more supportive of the majority's analysis, the authors also find cause for concern, with somewhat different emphasis in the nature of their concerns. Although they endorse the willingness of Justices McLachlin and L'Heureux-Dube to take social context into account, the authors (Devlin more than Pothier) think there is insufficient cause expressed. Devlin is more impressed, and Pothier more troubled, by the greater caution regarding social context expressed by Cory and Iacobucci JJ. As regards the test for a reasonable apprehension of bias, Devlin is concerned that the high threshold probability test improperly isolates judges from effective accountability, whereas Pothier supports the high threshold test so as to not render complex substantive equality analysis vulnerable to the challenge of bias. Both authors endorse the acknowledgement of the majority in the Supreme Court of Canada that colour blindness is not necessarily synonymous with impartiality.
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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 | 0.092 | 0.120 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.057 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.036 | 0.026 |
| Open science | 0.007 | 0.014 |
| Research integrity | 0.034 | 0.043 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".