1st Edition
Decoding the Court: Legal Data Insights from the Supreme Court of Canada
This edited collection combines state-of-the-art legal data analytics with in-depth doctrinal analysis to study the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC), Canada’s top court. A data analytics perspective adds new dimensions to the study of courts and their case law. It renders legal analysis scalable, making it possible to investigate thousands of judicial decisions, adding new breadth and depth. It also enables researchers to combine doctrinal questions about how the law evolves with institutional questions about how courts operate, shedding new light on how law works in practice. By applying a range of methods to study the content of SCC decisions, this work bridges the gap between qualitative and quantitative research. Demonstrating how new analytical perspectives can generate new insights about the Supreme Court, an institution which is closely studied by scholars both within and outside Canada, the book will be essential reading for legal scholars and political scientists, particularly those working in public law and in empirical legal studies.
Contents
Introduction
Wolfgang Alschner, Vanessa MacDonnell & Carissima Mathen
Chapter 1: A Bird’s-Eye View of the Canadian Supreme Court
Wolfgang Alschner & Keenan MacNeal
Part One - Evolution of the Court
Chapter 2: Four Stories About Canada’s Separation of Powers Doctrine
Vanessa MacDonnell & Keenan MacNeal
Chapter 3: Using Network Citation Analysis to Reveal Precedential Archetypes at the Supreme Court of Canada
Wolfgang Alschner & Isabelle St-Hilaire
Part Two: Cleavages on the Court
Chapter 4: Navigating Judicial Disagreement
Carissima Mathen, Keenan MacNeal, Stephen Bindman & Kelley Humber
Chapter 5: Bilingualism at the Supreme Court of Canada: Quantifying Citations to English, French, and Bilingual Doctrinal Sources
Terry Skolnik & Keenan MacNeal
Part Three: Changing Judicial Practice
Chapter 6: The Supreme Court of Canada Leave Project: A Dataset and Machine Learning Model for Predicting Leave Application Outcomes
Paul-Erik Veel & Katie Glowach
Chapter 7: The Supreme Court of Canada and Mainstreamed Judicial Analytics
Jena McGill & Amy Salyzyn
Biography
Wolfgang Alschner is Associate Professor at the University of Ottawa, where he leads the Legal Technology Lab.
Vanessa MacDonnell is Associate Professor at the University of Ottawa Faculty of Law and Co-Director of the uOttawa Public Law Centre.
Carissima Mathen is a Full Professor at the University of Ottawa Faculty of Law, Canada.
