Intervening in the Context of White Settler Colonialism: West Coast LEAF, Gender Equality and the Polygamy Reference
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In November 2011, the British Columbia Supreme Court released its judgement in Reference re: s.293 of the Criminal Code of Canada, upholding the prohibition on polygamy as constitutional. The Polygamy Reference, as it is known, concluded that the pressing and substantial objective of s. 293 is the prevention of harm to women, to children, and to the institution of monogamous marriage. This paper analyzes the submissions made by the feminist legal education organization, West Coast LEAF, one of the few feminist 'voices' taken seriously by the court. The apprehension of polygamy's harms was central to the Reference case. West Coast LEAF offered one of the most nuanced interpretations of how the criminal prohibition on polygamy should be interpreted with respect to harm. Yet as this paper argues, its position conceals and is underpinned by racialized relations of power that, however unwittingly, give weight to and indeed require the racial logic of white settler state sovereignty articulated in the Polygamy References' overall narrative. En noviembre de 2011, la Corte Suprema de la Columbia Británica dictó sentencia en Referencia: s.293 del Código Penal de Canadá, ratificando la prohibición de la poligamia como constitucional. La Referencia a la Poligamia, como se la conoce, decidió que el objetivo urgente y sustancial de la s. 293 es la prevención del daño a mujeres, a menores y a la institución del matrimonio monógamo. Este artículo analiza las aportaciones realizadas por la organización feminista de educación jurídica, West Coast LEAF, una de las pocas "voces" feministas tomadas en serio por el tribunal. El temor a los daños de la poligamia fue central en el caso. West Coast LEAF ofreció una de las interpretaciones más matizadas de cómo la prohibición criminal de la poligamia debería interpretarse con respecto al daño. Sin embargo, como se argumenta en este artículo, su posición encubre y se sustenta en relaciones de poder de carácter racial que, de forma inconsciente, dan importancia y de hecho requieren la lógica racial de la soberanía de los colonos blancos, articulada en la narrativa general de la Referencia a la Poligamia. DOWNLOAD THIS PAPER FROM SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2891019
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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".