Measuring Jurisprudence with AI: Rules, Standards, and the Supreme Court of Canada

In this episode of Runnymede Radio, we feature an original interview with Professor Norman Siebrasse (University of New Brunswick). Professor Siebrasse discusses his recent study using artificial intelligence to examine long-term trends in Supreme Court of Canada decisions. By analyzing thousands of judgments from 1974 to 2025, the study places cases on a rules–standards spectrum and identifies a marked shift toward more standard-like reasoning beginning in the early Charter era. The conversation also explores the idea of “Charter contagion,” the relationship between increasingly lengthy decisions and declining rule-likeness, and the broader promise and limits of AI in legal and academic research. This episode offers a careful examination of artificial intelligence as a research tool and of the evolving character of Supreme Court reasoning in Canada.