‘Political imagination, in its most fervid and patriotic flights’: Copyright and Constitutional Theory in Post-Confederation Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article is about differing ideas of self-government in post-Confederation Canada. It looks in particular at how the issue of copyright exposes a provocative and little-understood strain of constitutional theory in the first few decades of Confederation. This theory contended that the British North America Act was far more than a division of powers within a still-subordinate colony of the empire. Instead, proponents of the theory argued that the act was a constitutional turning point which transferred a share of British sovereignty to Canada, and gave the dominion new power even to contravene imperial law. This theory found support among many prominent politicians, judges, lawyers, and scholars. Armed with this idea, the federal Parliament passed a bill in 1872 that would have overridden imperial copyright. But neither the bill nor the theory succeeded. Britain blocked the legislation and an emerging consensus among constitutional thinkers, lawyers, and judges rejected its theoretical underpinnings. By exploring the debate over the limits of Canada’s power, this paper points to the diversity of ideas that surrounded even the basic precepts of the constitutional order after 1867.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.029 | 0.094 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".