Sacred Laws in Earthly Courts: Legal Pluralism in Canadian Religious Freedom Litigation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In three cases, Amselem, Multani and Hutterian Brethren of Wilson Colony, the Supreme Court of Canada examined conflicts between state law and the religious practices of litigants. While much has been written about the holdings in these cases, less is known about the experience of the participants. Based on in-depth interviews with litigants, lawyers and experts involved in these cases, this article examines how the participants viewed their relationship to the Canadian legal system. Drawing on critical legal pluralist scholarship, the author demonstrates that in many instances, participants (i) considered their religious norms as legally binding; (ii) placed their religious obligations above Canadian law; and (iii) filtered state law through the lens of their normative, religious beliefs. The author also examines how participants, in their submissions to the court, challenged the status of Canadian law as the sole legal system governing their lives. For many participants, these cases represented a conflict between religious law and state law that could not be easily reconciled. The overlap of legal systems in the participants’ lives is complex and the boundaries between state and religious principles are often blurred. With a greater awareness of these issues, courts could be more conscientious in applying the proportionality test of section 1 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in religious freedom cases.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.058 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".