1. DEFINING THE CHARTER: JUDICIAL ACTIVISM AND THE SUPREME COURT OF CANADA.
- Author
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Arnold, Taylor B.
- Subjects
- *
APPELLATE courts , *LEGAL judgments , *POLITICAL action committees , *SOCIAL movements , *POLITICAL participation - Abstract
Using a dataset of over 880,000 court decisions from Canadian federal and provincial courts, we derive an empirical centrality score for case importance. We demonstrate the utility of using our score in legal scholarship in compliment the simple and popular approach based on raw topical or citation counts. The methods for constructing an empirical measure of centrality are discussed and results are compared to expert qualitative rankings. In this net- work context, the general nature of the court from the past 30 years is discussed; particular attention is given to determining what areas of jurisprudence the court has been focused on. It is shown that the large quantity of criminal law cases is somewhat misleading, as the most important cases generally come from other areas of law. We conclude by showing how our methodology may be used in analysing other questions in Canadian jurisprudence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2012