Search and Seizure Cases in the Supreme Court of Canada: Extending an American Model of Judicial Decision Making across Countries.

The article examines the validity of the United States bounded rationality theory of judicial decision-making in the Canadian Supreme Court. Since the mid-1980s, scholars have contended that judicial decision making on the U.S. Supreme Court in search and seizure cases is influenced by factual scenarios as well as attitudinal variables. This research has demonstrated that U.S. justices rely on shorthand cues from the factual circumstances in the cases to help them reach their decisions. When these factual variables are subsequently coupled with attitudinal variables, these scholars have been able to accurately predict a significant proportion of search and seizure votes by justices on the U.S. Supreme Court. Given the importance of these findings, it is surprising that scholars have not tested the relevance of the factual model to other high courts in advanced democracies. The article attempts to apply the search and seizure factual model to cases decided by the Canadian Supreme Court, and assess the validity of the model in a different cultural context.