Sticking to Our Lanes: A Survey of Selected Studies on Federalism, Aboriginal Rights, and <i>Charter</i> Jurisprudence in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Canadian politics is shaped by three intersecting areas of constitutional law: Aboriginal rights, federalism and Charter jurisprudence. While a canon has emerged on the role of courts in Canadian democracy, it is often asserted that Charter scholarship dominates the field. Is this true—and does it matter? We address these questions through a systematic survey of 423 studies published between 2012 and 2022 in leading Canadian journals, books and edited volumes. We find that most work is produced by legal scholars, is descriptive, focuses on the Charter and examines a narrow range of cases and themes—most notably the court’s relationship with other institutions, its legitimacy and its power of judicial review. We argue that advancing our understanding of courts in Canadian democracy requires moving beyond our tendency to stick to our lanes—engaging core theories of judicial politics, employing explanatory methods and analyzing multiple areas of 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 | 0.012 | 0.037 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.020 | 0.062 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".