“Contextualizing” Bertha Wilson: Wilson as a Woman in Law in Mid-20th Century Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Justice Bertha Wilson was well known for her attentiveness to context. Indeed, her biographer, Ellen Anderson, reported that “Wilson’s characteristic stance [was] one of principled contextuality.” This paper explores the context in which Wilson became a lawyer in the 1960s and 1970s before her appointments to the Ontario Court of Appeal and later to the Supreme Court of Canada. By situating Justice Wilson as one of a small minority of women lawyers prior to the mid-1970s, when the numbers of women in law began to increase dramatically, it is possible to explore the kinds of opportunities and choices available to women in law in a time of transition within the legal profession. The paper also tries to explain Justice Wilson’s appointment to the judiciary by exploring societal changes, particularly the strength of the women’s movement and its influence on “gatekeepers” in the profession, in this changing context. In assessing Justice Wilson’s experiences, the paper compares the careers of three prominent women lawyers who were not appointed to the bench in Ontario: Vera Parsons, Margaret Hyndman and Laura Legge. It also compares the experiences of the other two “first women judges” in Ontario: Helen Kinnear, the first woman appointed to a County Court in the Commonwealth in 1943, and Mabel Van Camp, the first woman appointed to the Ontario Supreme Court in 1971. Overall, the paper suggests that the experiences of these women lawyers provide insights about the relationship between ideas of gender and legal professionalism.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.104 | 0.050 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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".