ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces Lenczner Slaght's Supreme Court of Canada Leave Project: a database containing dozens of datapoints pertaining to every single leave application decided by the Supreme Court of Canada from January 1, 2018, onward. While much of this book is focused on appeals heard by the Supreme Court of Canada, most legal matters never get to the Supreme Court. This is because, for the majority of cases, the Court must grant leave (permission) for cases to be heard, and the likelihood of getting leave in any case is low. In a typical year, the Court grants leave in less than 10% of cases in which it is sought. The Lenczner Slaght Project provides a variety of insights into the operation of the Supreme Court as an institution. The chapter authors also use the dataset to build a machine learning model – in essence, an algorithm that learns on the basis of known training data, which is in turn used to make predictions regarding new data – to predict the likelihood of cases getting leave to the Supreme Court.
