Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores a puzzle in Canadian legal historiography: the meaning of “British justice” and its relationship to race. Scholars have noted the use of this term in the interwar years of the twentieth century, to object to demonstrations of racial bias in the legal system. The puzzle is why. From the mid-1850s onward, statutes aimed at circumscribing the rights and opportunities of aboriginal people multiplied. British Columbia passed anti-Chinese, anti-Japanese, and anti-Indian legislation. Saskatchewan prohibited Chinese and Japanese employers from hiring white women. At least some officials supposed that legislation targeting African Canadians would be permissible. In 1924, the TorontoTelegramcalled for a poll tax against Jews. It is clear that between 1880 and 1920 or thereabouts, federal and provincial law was deeply involved in creating and reifying legal categories that rested explicitly on physical distinctions perceived to exist among people, which were assumed to signal morally and legally relevant characteristics. Why, then, would anyone have thought that “British justice” should be a shield against racism?
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".