Teaching Religious Freedom as Legal Pluralism in Canadian Constitutional Law Classes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, I propose a non-traditional approach for teaching religious freedom in Canadian constitutional law classes. Drawing on materials submitted in three Supreme Court of Canada cases, I suggest using the insights of legal pluralism to analyze religious freedom claims. Legal pluralism recognizes non-state normative traditions as legal in their own right. This, I argue, provides an entry point for engaging in questions of legal theory, contrasting definitions of law proffered by legal pluralists, positivists, and natural law theorists. Interrogating these definitions of law will help students make explicit their ideas of what it means to be lawyer, contributing to the development of their professional identities. This approach also allows students to develop skills of cross-cultural communication that will enable them to better interact with and represent a diverse clientele. I provide an outline for class discussion on five themes: (1) the use of legal language, (2) social ordering, (3) interpretation and interpretive communities, (4) hierarchies of normative traditions, and (5) normative traditions as lenses for one another.
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 | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 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".