Decoding the Court: Legal Data Insights from the Supreme Court of Canada

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.

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