Precedents in Canadian and American Constitutional Culture: A Comparative Essay
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis explores the place of constitutional precedents in contemporary Canadian and American constitutional culture. The author identifies four elements that explain the relative indifference in Canada to the problem of stability and change in the interpretation of constitutional rights and freedoms: the lack of a historical constitutional narrative in Canadian constitutional culture, the lack of meaningful â super precedentsâ , the structure of the proportionality analysis under the Oakes test and the adherence to a less formalist and more openly political conception of constitutional adjudication. These elements are contrasted with the American experience in which precedents are central to any constitutional discourse. The comparison tries to make explicit how these differences are linked to different assumptions and expectations about the rule of law and the role of the judiciary in adapting the legal traditions of these two Common Law countries to the challenges of written constitutionalism.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.045 | 0.040 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".