Purposivism, textualism, and originalism in recent cases on charter interpretation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Both the Supreme Court of Canada and Canadian scholarship often treat debates about constitutional interpretation as settled. This articles shows that this is not so. While it is commonly assumed that purposivism is the authoritative interpretive method, originalism and textualism continue to influence the Supreme Court's decision-making. This article demonstrates their decisive influence on three recent cases interpreting the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. After an overview of the main interpretive approaches present in the Supreme Court's eclectic jurisprudence―pursposivism, living constitutionalism, and originalism―the article critically assesses the majority and minority reasons in R v Stillman, R v Poulin, and Quebec (Attorney General) v 9147-0732 Québec Inc. While all the opinions profess fidelity to purposivism, they are sharply divided about interpretive questions. A close examination of the majority opinions shows that they were, in fact, more textualist or even originalist than they acknowledged. Their endorsement of purposivism and even the ostensible rejection of textualism in Québec Inc are hollow.
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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 | 0.028 | 0.048 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.039 | 0.063 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".