Source: https://doubleaspect.blog/tag/empirical-turn/
Timestamp: 2019-04-19 14:24:10+00:00

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In a provocative paper recently posted on SSRN (and based on the HLA Hart Memorial Lecture delivered last year at Oxford), Frederick Schauer challenges a fairly common tendency to argue that apparent conflicts between rights and important interests, or among rights, are illusory, and that, properly understood, these rights and interests can be reconciled so as to avoid the conflict. Professor Schauer calls this tendency “Panglossianism”, after the obstinately and obliviously optimistic character of Voltaire’s Candide, and argues that it makes for muddled thinking that will end up compromising the rights that Panglossians purport to value. Professor Schauer makes important points, although I am not persuaded by his takeaway.
To relate just one of the examples he uses, when it comes to prohibitions on hate speech, those who oppose them will often insist that hate speech is not especially harmful, or is not harmful in ways that anyone should really care about, so that upholding the right to freedom of expression has no real cost. Conversely, many of those who support the criminalization of hate speech invoke the mantra of “hate speech is not free speech”, similarly insisting that their preferred resolution of this issue is costless. “Panglossianism” can accordingly involve either a reading of the data (or speculation) about the effects of policies that minimizes their impact on rights, or a redefinition of rights or other constitutional rules that narrows them so as to ensure that a favoured policy is not precluded.
Professor Schauer argues that Panglossianism is a mechanism people deploy to deal with the threat of cognitive dissonance that they might experience if they acknowledge that their preferred policies and constitutional commitments are in tension, and even in conflict. It is easier to believe, and to say, that such conflicts are not real, or can easily avoided, than to deal with them, which would mean taking sides, recognizing that one is wrong about rights or that one’s preferred policy cannot be implemented.
Panglossianism, Professor Schauer notes, can undermine not only rights protections, but all manner of intended constitutional rules. Resorting to it may be psychologically comforting, but it will weaken the very idea of constitutional constraints on governments’ pursuit of their preferred policies.
I think that Professor Schauer describes a real problem. It is indeed tempting to say that the enforcement of one’s favoured right does not compromise the attainment of valuable policy goals or the respect of other rights; it is similarly tempting to insist the implementation of one’s preferred policy conflicts with no real rights, properly understood. Debates about free speech are one area where this dynamic is especially visible, as Professor Schauer notes, but there are any number of others. It is arguable (which is not necessarily to say true) that the controversy over the federal government’s demand that religious groups “attest” to the compatibility between their “core mandate” and (some) Charter rights, about which I’ve written here, also involves Panglossian arguments on both sides.
And Professor Schauer is quite right to point out that Panglossianism can affect thinking about structural constitutional rules, and not just rights. Indeed, I would suggest that in Canadian constitutional law, Panglossianism is an especially strong danger in federalism jurisprudence. In Charter cases, section 1, which authorizes the imposition of “limits” to rights, channels the analysis into a more explicit consideration of the conflict between rights (which tend to be defined in broad and abstract terms) and policy reasons for restricting them. By contrast, the movement towards the erosion of the exclusivity of federal and provincial heads of power under the banner of “co-operative federalism” proceeds from the Supreme Court’s unwillingness to acknowledge the existence of conflict between what it sees as desirable policy and the federal division of powers. Federalism analysis simply makes no room for the acknowledgement of this conflict. This is not to say that we should change the way we approach it ― but we should beware the Panglossian dangers inherent in what we do.
Yet while I think that there is a great deal of truth to Professor Schauer’s diagnosis of the pathologies of Panglossianism, his prescriptions against it may not be especially salutary. Professor Schauer does not tell us much about how to assess what he sees as potentially-Panglossian claims about the effects of policies or the scope of rights. He warns against thinking, for instance, that not punishing hate speech is costless because such speech does not really cause any social evils. Fair enough ― those of us opposed to bans on hate speech on normative grounds will be tempted to downplay its effects. But what if it really doesn’t have any? Conversely, if hate speech really is socially harmful, that happens to align with the preferences of those who want to ban it. Both sides in this particular debate cannot, I think, be wrong at the same time. The mere fact that an empirical claim aligns with someone’s prior normative preferences cannot mean that the claim is wrong. The same applies to claims about the scope of rights (to the extent that these can be said to be correct or incorrect at all).
So while we should be wary of the dangers described by Professor Schauer, he has not convinced me to give up on empirical or otherwise contextualized thinking about rights in favour of a priori philosophizing. This is all the more so in the numerous cases that concern what might be described as marginal (possible) infringements of rights. Perhaps the hate speech question, which is about whether people can be prevented from saying certain things at all can be sufficiently resolved by an a priori insistence that such bans are never permissible. Note, though, that the argument wouldn’t work the other way: a case for banning hate speech can only be made if one is allowed to rely on empirical considerations (unless of course one takes the position that there is no right to free speech at all and anything can be banned). But what about, say, restrictions on financing political parties? Most people accept that at least some restrictions are acceptable (most people in North America, anyway; New Zealand has no limit on how much one can give, and seems to be doing just fine!). Many ― most, I hope ― would also agree that some restrictions are too extreme and cannot be justified. The issue is where to draw the line, and where to err in doubt. I don’t think that we can give remotely interesting answers to these questions without knowing something about the current practices of political fundraising and the likely effects of raising or lowering the existing restrictions. Again, Professor Schauer’s warnings about Panglossianism are relevant, but his suggestion that we resolve our questions by reference to first principles alone is not helpful.
Now, Professor Schauer is right, of course, that any empirically contingent answers might be inapplicable under different circumstances. He might be overstating the extent to which this is a problem: I’m not sure, for instance, that cultural contingency of rights protections is objectionable; it’s not obvious that rights must be the same everywhere and at all times. However, to the extent that, within a legal order, rights are implemented through judicially articulated constitutional doctrine, this doctrine risks being destabilized if the empirical or normative premises on which it is based are challenged by the evolution of society and of what we know about it. How to deal with this risk of instability (and its converse, the risk of a static doctrine divorced from reality) is a difficult question, to which I have no very good answers. But I doubt that we can avoid trying to get at some answers, at least, if only mediocre (and contingent!) ones.
Thinking about constitutional rules and their relationship with policy is a difficult business. Professor Schauer is right to remind us that we are too often tempted to oversimplify it by pretending that contradictions between our normative commitments and policy preferences are less significant than they really are. Unfortunately, he doesn’t offer us much by way of useful advice for identifying the exact situations where our thinking is so sidetracked, and his suggestion that we think more about abstract principle than about the real-world effect of policy does not strike me as especially helpful. Nevertheless, Professor Schauer’s warning is an important one, and we should heed it even if we conclude that we must continue exposing ourselves to the dangers he highlights.
Last week, the Alberta Court of Appeal delivered an interesting decision rejecting a constitutional challenge to the province’s prohibition on private health insurance brought by way of an application. In Allen v Alberta, 2015 ABCA 277, the Court held unanimously that the applicant hadn’t provided a sufficient evidentiary basis for his challenge, and that it should have been brought by way of an action and adjudicated after a full trial. This might have been the correct result, but the route the Justice Slatter, the author of the leading opinion, took to get there is in many ways disturbing. It illustrates, I think, some worrying tendencies in Canadian constitutional law generally, and also the difficulties which challenges to the government’s healthcare monopoly specifically will face.
In a way, the case is a very simple, and also a very Canadian, one. The applicant had suffered a back injury playing hockey, and even as his pain was getting worse and worse, he was put on a two-year long waiting list for an operation. The pain was too much, and he finally decided to undergo surgery in the United States, at his own (very considerable) expense. And thereafter, he went to court, seeking a declaration that the provision of the Alberta Healthcare Insurance Act that barred private health insurance from covering healthcare services provided by the public insurance plan was contrary to s. 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
The argument was that the government monopoly on health insurance resulted in people having to wait a long time for healthcare, and to suffer as a result, thus breaching the “security of the person” guarantee of s. 7. To support his claim, the applicant submitted “a number of medical reports and proof of expenses he had incurred,”  and relied on the Supreme Court’s decision in Chaoulli v. Quebec (Attorney General), 2005 SCC 35,  1 S.C.R. 791, which declared a similar restriction on private health insurance contrary to Québec’s Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms.
Justice Martin, in a rather terse concurrence, agrees with this reasoning, and would go no further. While Justice Slatter continues, to discuss Chaoulli and the applicant’s claim that it effectively settles the case, I will pause here and comment on this part of his reasons. As I said above, the conclusion that more evidence was required in this case may well have been correct. To be sure, it seems unlikely that the causal relationships between the prohibition on private health insurance and the existence of lengthy waiting lists established in Chaoulli are somehow not present in this case. A legislature that proceeded on the assumption that there was such a relationship would be acting rationally. But it is at least arguable that a court needs more than an assumption, no matter how plausible. It needs evidence. Allison Orr Larsen’s warnings about the dangers of “factual precedents” are apposite in the Canadian context. It may well be that a fuller record, including expert reports would have been necessary here, though I’m not sure I understand Justice Slatter’s insistence on the need for a trial to dispose of this case, as opposed to an application proceeding on a more developed record.
That said, if Justice Slatter is right, his conclusion ought to be disquieting. It confirms the worry that Sonia Lawrence expressed in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Canada (Attorney General) v. Bedford, 2013 SCC 72,  3 S.C.R. 1101, and that I have been dwelling on ever since, that mounting a constitutional challenge to a statute may be becoming prohibitively complex and expensive. Marni Soupcoff, of the Canadian Constitution Foundation, which is mounting a challenge of its own to government healthcare monopoly, makes this case in a compelling op-ed in the National Post. Constitutional litigation is at danger of becoming the preserve of (relatively) well-funded public interest litigation outfits (such as the CCF). The Charter was supposed to be “the people’s package” of constitutional reform, but the people risk being prevented from bringing Charter cases by the requirement that such cases be supported by expert reports and proceed by way of trial rather than a less expensive procedure. Justice Slatter’s claim that there exists a “presumption” to this effect is particularly worrisome ― all the more so since he provides no indication as to how this presumption might be rebutted.
I want to comment on a couple of other points in the part of his reasons I have been discussing. The first one has to do with the nature of judicial review of legislation and the courts’ role in constitutional cases, on which Justice Slatter expounds in the excerpt of par. 20 quoted above. That passage contains a number of serious mistakes. For one thing, the constitution does not “recognize the ‘supremacy of Parliament'” ― those words appear nowhere in the Constitution Acts, and while Parliamentary sovereignty is arguably one of the constitution’s underlying principles, it is subject to the limits imposed by constitutional text and other such principles. For another, it is wrong to speak of an entrenched constitution that limits Parliamentary sovereignty as something new, something that only “now” exists. Canada has always had an entrenched constitution, and Canadian courts have always invalidated Canadian laws inconsistent with it, although the legal rationale for this practice did indeed change in 1982, from the supremacy of Imperial law to the supremacy of the (Canadian) constitution. Last but not least, Justice Slatter misrepresents the courts’ role on judicial review when he says that “statutes that are clearly inconsistent with the constitution are of no force or effect” ― there no such “clear inconsistency” requirement either in s. 52 of the Constitution Act, 1982 or in the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence. Constitutional cases, like all civil cases, are decided on an ordinary “balance of probabilities” standard.
These two points together lead me to an additional observation. Justice Slatter’s approach is clearly very deferential to legislative choices. That would make him a “conservative” on the definitions that have been floating around of late, for example in some of Sean Fine’s “Tory judges” articles. But, as I’ve said before, “there is nothing inherently conservative about such an approach. It can serve to validate left- or right-leaning policies, depending on the politics of the policy-makers.” This case shows that this is indeed so. If anything, it shows that judges may be able to adopt a strategically deferential posture in order to achieve “progressive” results just as easily as to achieve “conservative” ones.
say nothing about the difficult social issues that come before the courts … Controlling this vague language falls to the courts, and an absence of institutional self-restraint by the judiciary makes the problem worse, not better. The Supreme Court has recast the phrase “principles of fundamental justice” with even less precise terms like overbreadth, disproportionality and arbitrariness, none of which have been comprehensively defined. It is, unfortunately, sometimes difficult to discern the difference between these concepts and a simple disagreement by the judiciary with the public policy decisions of democratically elected officials.
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a Canadian court reverse-benchslap the Supreme Court in this way. Justice Slatter’s attack is pretty vicious, and in my view largely uncalled for.
It is true that s. 7 was not intended to be applied in the way it does, but it is, to say the least, not obvious that “original intent” is an appropriate criterion for interpreting it. Even if, contrary to the Supreme Court of Canada, one is inclined to be originalist, an “original public meaning” interpretation might support the Supreme Court’s conclusion, in Re B.C. Motor Vehicle Act,  2 S.C.R. 486 that “fundamental justice” is not a matter of procedure only. Anyway, it seems to me that it is a bit late to re-litigate that particular issue.
Beyond that, I don’t think it’s at all fair to reproach the Supreme Court for invoking principles such as overbreadth, disproportionality and arbitrariness in applying s. 7. They are, surely, not more open-ended than the expression “principles of fundamental justice.” The Court has tried, in cases such as Bedford and Carter v. Canada (Attorney General), 2015 SCC 5,  1 S.C.R. 331, to give them a relatively specific meaning, and in my view has been at least somewhat successful in this endeavour. Justice Slatter’s dismissal of this jurisprudence as “a simple disagreement by the judiciary with the public policy decisions of democratically elected officials” looks not unlike the expression of a simple disagreement by one judge with the constitutional policy decisions of his hierarchical superiors.
In a sense, this decision is just sound and fury, signifying nothing ― except, of course, that the applicant spent a significant amount of time and money on a litigation that proved fruitless. As Justice Watson rightly observes in his concurrence, “[d]ismissal of a declaration on the grounds that it was not made out in the pleadings and evidence is not the same thing as saying that an action properly pleaded, fairly proceeded with, and backed by sufficient evidence would be impossible.”  Perhaps the CCF will succeed in its own efforts to bring such an action. Yet the Court’s mistakes and dubious assertions about its role (about which I might have more to say separately) are cause for worrying, and the possibility that it is right about the high evidentiary threshold that a constitutional challenge must get over before even being considered on the merits is, if anything, even more distressing.
It might have looked like an essentially technical matter, but the Supreme Court’s recent decision in R. v. Tatton, 2015 SCC 33 turns out to be full of interesting things to discuss. I have already written about what it might suggest about the Court’s views on mandatory minimum sentences, and what it tells us about the respective roles of the courts and Parliament in law reform. I come back to it again to follow up on Lisa Silver’s very interesting post over at Ideablawg about the lack of scientific foundations beneath Justice Moldaver’s opinion for a unanimous court.
Liberally sprinkled throughout the decision is reference to the inextricable connection between intoxication and crime. … Despite this heavy reliance on what appears to be scientific truths, at no time did the Court refer to or support the position with scientific study or research.
that the issue is has not been empirically determined and the relationship between alcohol, mental processes, and crime is highly complicated and variable.
Mr. Justice Moldaver relied upon the court’s perception of the “science” … in reiterating a long held position that intoxication is not a defence to a general intent offence without referencing any recent empirical studies … By proceeding on this basis, the Court missed the opportunity to provide some rational basis for the general/specific distinction. Instead, the Court has simply perpetuated a legal fiction.
The Court’s “empirical turn,” most recently exemplified by its decision in R. v. Smith, 2015 SCC 34, which relied on research regarding the therapeutic effects of various forms of medical marijuana, has not exactly followed a consistent trajectory. There have been missed opportunities such Tatton along the way, or R. v. Fearon, 2014 SCC 77,  3 S.C.R. 621, where Justice Cromwell claimed that armed robberies had “become depressingly routine,” despite crime statistics ― to which he did not refer ― suggesting that their incidence was falling. In the rest of this post, I would like to venture some observations on the context in which these missed opportunities and outright misstatements occur.
For instance, it is important to note that the Court is not the only party to ignore the science relevant to its cases. In Tatton, only one of the three facta (that of the Ontario Crown) submitted to the court referred to scientific studies ― and only as a additional support for the claim that “[i]t is well known that many people do foolish and dangerous things when drinking.”  The “common sense observation” is what matters in that passage; the scientific evidence is almost an afterthought. The accused and Criminal Lawyers’ Association of Ontario, which intervened to support him, did not manage even that. They were content with citing cases and, at most, reports of law-reform commissions. As Richard Posner says in his Reflections on Judging, the bench and the bar share a lack of familiarity with the sciences, whether social or natural and, worse, a lack of curiosity that results in an unwillingness to investigate the backgrounds against which legal rules operate, to go beyond the “common sense” assumptions which may bear little, if any, resemblance to the scientific truth.
At the same time, it is not enough to blame the lawyers’ narrow-mindedness. The “empirical turn” suggests, after all, that some of them can overcome it at least some of the time. Why not in Tatton though? The nature of the case, I suspect, is an important factor here. In commenting on Canada (Attorney General) v. Bedford, 2013 SCC 72,  3 S.C.R. 1101, Sonia Lawrence observed, vividly, that the Charter challenges emblematic of the “empirical turn” “aren’t cases that walk into your office one day. They are cases put together piece by painstaking piece.” Tatton, by contrast, was a case that “walked in the office” of small-town law firm ― perhaps literally. Mr. Tatton was facing a criminal charge. He probably had little money. It’s not quite fair to expect that his lawyers, with his and their limited time resources, would have done as thorough a job of mounting an empirical case as an interest group pursuing a constitutional challenge on its own terms. (Still, not being able to mount a perfect empirical case is no excuse for not even trying to inject at least some scientific background into one’s argument.) In my own take on Bedford, I wrote that “[t]he government, as the best funded and most powerful interest group of them all, is more likely to have the resources to put together a solid record than those who challenge it.” It is perhaps not just coincidental that the only references, however minimal, to scientific literature in this litigation appeared in the Crown’s factum.
That, as he points out elsewhere in that book, is no easy task.
Indeed, there are no easy solutions to the problems I have tried to canvass in this post. Judicial decision-making that doesn’t try to address empirical evidence or scientific research risks going astray, but so do attempts to take stock of such information. There are longstanding prejudices of all the branches of the legal profession ― including, I’m afraid, the academic branch ― as well as resource constraints to contend with. If Judge Posner has no solution for these problems, I will certainly not pretend to have one either. But perhaps if more of us start thinking about them, we will be able to come up with something.
Last week, the Supreme Court held that the prohibition on medical marijuana products intended to be ingested or applied as creams ― as opposed to dried medical marijuana for the purposes of smoking, for which a permission can be granted ― is arbitrary and, therefore, not in accordance with principles of fundamental justice, in violation of s. 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The decision, R. v. Smith, 2015 SCC 34, is terse, but it is noteworthy for a number of reasons.
Besides, there was no evidence that the prohibited forms of marijuana are more dangerous to users, or that they are more likely to fall into the hands of people not authorized to use the drug for medical purposes. The result is “a total disconnect between the limit on liberty and security of the person imposed by the prohibition and its object,”  contrary to the requirement of non-arbitrariness. Needless to say, this outcome cannot be justified under s. 1 of the Charter, which requires a rational connection between an infringement of a right and some “pressing and substantial” objective.
This seems like an obviously correct decision, at least assuming that the trial judge’s assessment of the evidence on the effects of the various forms of medical marijuana is correct ― indeed, one wonders whether it was really necessary to make a Supreme Court case out of this issue. And what a case, too. Decisions signed by “the Court” are normally issues in the most politically salient and controversial cases. The assisted suicide decision, Carter v. Canada (Attorney General), 2015 SCC 5,  1 S.C.R. 331 was one such case. Arguably the Court’s most high profile drug-related decision, in the Insite case, Canada (Attorney General) v. PHS Community Services Society, 2011 SCC 44,  3 S.C.R. 134 was not. Yet judging by the government’s hysterical reaction, the Court was right to treat what strikes me as a comparatively trivial matter as equivalent in importance to assisted suicide. This means, by the way, that the government’s attacks on the Court’s integrity may well be having the perverse effect of making the judges less accountable ― at least if it is the case, as many believe, that opinions signed by their individual authors are an important element of judicial accountability.
The Court, undoubtedly, is well aware of the political responses to its rulings. Its refusal to suspend the declaration of invalidity might be further evidence of this. That people would remain without treatment to which they are constitutionally entitled was no less true in Carter than it is here; that law and law enforcement would be left in limbo was just as true after the Court struck down the prostitution provisions of the Criminal Code in Canada (Attorney General) v. Bedford, 2013 SCC 72,  3 S.C.R. 1101. Yet in both those cases, the Court granted the government’s request for a suspension of the declarations of unconstitutionality. The government’s response ― especially its foot-dragging on Carter ― are unlikely to have impressed the judges.
The last point I wanted to note is that Smith joins the growing line of cases, which notably includes Insite, Bedford, and Carter, that has been described as an “empirical turn” ― a tendency to resolve Charter cases by reference to scientific evidence. The Court is not exactly consistent in its use of such evidence, as I have noted in the past, and as Lisa Silver notes in a fascinating recent post over at Ideablawg (which I hope to discuss in more detail soon). But Smith, at least, shows that this trend, however inconsistent, is still very much alive.
It also shows that, the government, for now anyway, tends to lose when scientific evidence ― which the current government, at least, so often ignores ― drives the case. Here, though, the loss seems particularly clear. The government, apparently, had no real arguments at all for its position, which makes me wonder ― what is it that they were smoking when they decided it was constitutionally defensible?
Author Leonid SirotaPosted on June 17, 2015 Categories Constitutional law, Criminal Law/PolicyTags arbitrariness, Charter, empirical turn, Supreme Court of Canada, war on drugs1 Comment on What Were They Smoking?

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