Demonstrations and the Law: Patterns of Law's Negative Effects on the Ground and the Practical Implications
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although demonstrations are a recurring and key feature of Canadian and other societies, law often has negative and unacknowledged larger impacts on demonstrations while they occur when one examines how courts and police practically use and apply law on the ground. By pragmatically analyzing the experiences in Canada of Ipperwash, the Toronto G20, the Occupy movement, and “Idle No More,” this article illustrates patterns of how injunctions and criminal law processes negatively interacted with those demonstrations while they happened. The article begins by reviewing law’s usually detrimental impact on demonstrations-in-progress in the context of interlocutory and statutory injunctions (unless rare circumstances arise). For example, given the prior status quo focus of such injunctions, demonstrators have an uphill battle to practically win such motions. As well, using Hohfeldian conceptions, specific “rights” (such as property rights or regulated property use) usually prevail over more general aspirational “privileges” (such as freedom of expression and freedom of peaceful assembly) when they come into conflict. Law also does not usually act in prospective (or ex ante) manner for specific future or current situations. The article then examines how the police can use criminal powers and processes to effectively shut down or undermine demonstrations in the heat of the moment, notably because any after-the-fact (or ex post) reviews or accountability for misuse come much later, if at all. Finally, the conclusion explores some practical implications as a result and potential mitigation methods, such as more pragmatic understanding and balancing, better articulating some of the specific rights associated with demonstrations and dissent, and implementing more holistic and nuanced solutions, including trying to practically minimize and avoid raising tensions in such situations.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.036 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.050 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.014 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| 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".