Historian and Courts:<i>R. v. Marshall and Mi'kmaq</i>Treaties on Trial
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In September, 1999, the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) released its decision inR v. Marshall. Donald Marshall Jr., no stranger to Canadian law, had been convicted of catching eels out of season, without a licence, and selling them, contrary to the federalFisheries Act. He admitted the offences, but appealed his conviction to the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal and then to the SCC on the grounds that the 1760–61 treaties between the Mi'kmaq and the British recognized his right, as a Mi'kmaq, to catch and sell fish, and that this right was protected under the guarantee of Aboriginal and treaty rights in the Canadian constitution. Justice Binnie, writing for the majority of the SCC, overturned the convictions. The Mi'kmaq, he held, did have treaty rights based on the 1760–61 treaties to catch and sell fish, including eels. The Mi'kmaq were delighted. After many years and many appearances before Canadian judges (R. v. Syliboy, R. v. Issac, andR. v. Simon), it appeared that the courts were finally prepared to recognize what the Mi'kmaq had long believed: that the eighteenth century treaties were the foundation of their relationship with Canada, that the treaties were still in force, and that they guaranteed commercial hunting and fishing rights in their traditional territories.
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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 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.019 | 0.024 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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".