Governing Through Precaution to Protect Equality and Freedom: Obscenity and Indecency Law in Canada after R. v. Labaye (2005)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper traces the logics underpinning obscenity and indecency law in Canada from R. v. Hicklin (1868) to the present day in R. v. Labaye (2005) to discuss the emergence of a precautionary principle in the law governing sexually explicit materials and conduct. The most recent Supreme Court decision on obscenity and indecency law (R. v. Labaye 2005) is interesting for its appropriation of a security inspired logic of pre-emption (or precautionary governance) into the heart of obscenity and indecency law. The replacement of the community standards of tolerance test for the undue exploitation of harm with a new, so-called objective test for risk of harm, obviates the need for empirical evidence of harm to justify the exercise of state power. Today, risk of harm becomes a stronger element within the rubric of obscenity and indecency law thus enabling criminalization on the basis of a judge's perception of the imagined negative effects of sexual conduct and materials on constitutional values such as liberty and equality.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".