On living federal lives: Katherine Swinton’s <i>The Supreme Court and Canadian Federalism</i> and the future of federal imagination
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Katherine Swinton published The Supreme Court and Canadian Federalism: The Laskin-Dickson Years in 1990. It was a time of disenchantment with the law of federalism. Many scholars found the Court’s interventions to be inconsistent or useless, hiding essentially political decisions behind a legally formalistic facade. Swinton’s rebuttal remains one of the most robust and sophisticated defences of the role of law and courts in the life of Canadian federalism. Focusing on the wave of decisions of the 1970s and 1980s that thrust the Court back into the constitutional spotlight, Swinton reconstructed the principled visions of federalism and constitutional legality of Bora Laskin, Jean Beetz, and Brian Dickson. This article contextualizes Swinton’s writings and analyses some of her main contributions to Canadian constitutional scholarship. Beyond the rich reconstruction of the jurisprudential debates of this pivotal period, the article argues that Swinton’s whole approach rested on the appreciation of the importance of federalism in peoples’ lives. Contrary to what critics believed, Swinton argued that governments are only one among many parties interested in the resolution of jurisdictional disputes. Swinton’s penchant for the ‘jurisprudence of interests’ of Chief Justice Brian Dickson, which best captures the plurality of interested parties in federalism disputes, still offers valuable resources to think afresh about persisting constitutional debates. The article suggests that the development of the law of constitutional amendment can be read in a new light when ‘jurisdiction’ and ‘interests’ are thus considered as alternative prisms through which to think about the constitutional protection afforded to communities that transcend the provincial and federal orders of government. The article concludes by suggesting that a deepening of Swinton’s pluralist sensibility is needed if federalism is to speak meaningfully to one of Canada’s most pressing constitutional challenges – the confrontation of Indigenous and Crown sovereignty.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.035 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".