The Law of Servants and the Servants of Law: Enforcing Masters' Rights in Montreal, 1830-1845
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The law governing masters and servants offers a unique point from which to examine the history of Montreal labour law during the early nineteenth century. The author examines the methods by which masters attempted to enforce their employment rights in the judicial district of Montreal during the years 1830 to 1845. Using primary sources from various Montreal court records, the author reconstructs the judicial and quasi-judicial processes that accompanied the manifold master-servant disputes. He concludes that while the letter of the law may have favoured masters, courts were relatively even-handed in adjudicating such disputes. He examines the role of newspaper advertisements as tools for protecting masters rights. Through analysis of these advertisements the author paints a colourful and animated portrait of master-servant relations at that time. The article also focuses on the role of courts in interpreting disputes - especially those involving desertions of indentured servants. While the author concentrates his attention on the role of courts within the city of Montreal, he also draws a comparison with the role of courts outside the city limits. Although many similarities existed between the respective courts, there nevertheless remained significant differences.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".