Appealing to higher authority : explaining the Federal Government's appeals to the Supreme Court of Canada in charter cases
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The adoption of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms has increased the policy importance of litigation, and, accordingly, of those government lawyers who handle such litigation. In particular, policies and laws may stand or fall based on whether the government appeals its losses in the lower courts to the Supreme Court of Canada. This dissertation seeks to determine whether the federal government's appeal decisions are based on a rational weighing of multiple factors related to costs, case importance, and the prospect of securing access to, and victory in, the Supreme Court. This first requires ascertaining the locus of litigating authority and the decision making process within the government. Surveys and personal interviews of government counsel reveal that the Department of Justice Canada, which holds a near-monopoly over Ottawa's litigation, combines decentralisation by region and policy area in the conduct of litigation with a centralised appeal decision making process. Quantitative and qualitative analyses of the government's lower court losses and Supreme Court appeals confirm the dissertation's central assumption that the federal government's appeals are calculated choices, with case importance, avoiding losses on appeal, and protecting governmental authority emerging as the strongest motivations. Further, the dissertation situates these findings in the context of the contemporary "dialogue" debate, providing the first systematic analysis of government dialogue with lower appeal courts, and incorporating the concept of appeals as a form of dialogue. The study finds a significant degree of dialogue between the federal government and the lower courts, especially following highly activist judicial rulings. This is consistent with findings from the preceding sections, that Justice Department lawyers actively defend the government's policy-making authority.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.028 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.029 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| 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".