Divine Intervention, Part II: Narratives of Norm Entrepreneurship in Canadian Religious Freedom Litigation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Constitutional litigation has become a central arena for debate about human rights. Groups from all points on the political spectrum have turned to legal advocacy, “intervening” in judicial proceedings in an effort to advance their preferred interpretations of particular rights.\nJudges and scholars remain divided on whether and how interveners are valuable. This paper evaluates a main rationale for intervention: interveners improve adjudication by enriching courts’ understandings of the issues before them. We use qualitative analysis to examine the extent to which interveners in Canada have succeeded in contributing to judicial pronouncements on the scope and meaning of religious freedom.\nWe find that interveners have been modestly successful in influencing religious freedom doctrine. While the doctrine has not shifted radically in response to intervener submissions, interveners have impacted several SCC decisions. Interveners have had a more pronounced impact on a few minority judgments that could one day become law.\nLe contentieux constitutionnel est devenu une arène centrale du débat sur les droits de la personne. Des groupes de tous les horizons politiques se sont tournés vers le plaidoyer juridique, en « intervenant » dans les procédures judiciaires afin de faire valoir leurs interprétations préférées de certains droits.\nLes juges et les universitaires demeurent divisés sur la question de savoir si et comment les intervenants sont utiles. Dans le présent article, nous évaluons l’une des principales justifications de l’intervention: les intervenants améliorent la prise de décision en enrichissant la compréhension qu’ont les tribunaux des questions qui leur sont soumises. Nous utilisons une analyse qualitative pour examiner dans quelle mesure les intervenants au Canada ont réussi à contribuer aux prises de position judiciaires sur la portée et la signification de la liberté de religion.\nNous constatons que les intervenants ont réussi de façon modeste à influencer la doctrine de la liberté de religion. Bien que la doctrine n’ait pas changé radicalement en réponse aux déclarations des intervenants, ces derniers ont influencé plusieurs décisions de la Cour suprême du Canada. Les intervenants ont eu un impact plus prononcé sur quelques jugements minoritaires qui pourraient un jour devenir loi.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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 teacher head, 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".