Reforming and Resisting Criminal Law: Criminal Justice and the Tragically Hip
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines two Tragically Hip songs, 38 Years Old and Wheat Kings, with a view to understanding how they can be interpreted as a call both to reform and resist criminal law.In a reformist spirit, 38 Years Old can be interpreted as an imaginary hypothetical that suggests that judges should be able to devise exemptions from all mandatory sentences, including life imprisonment for murder.The song can also be interpreted as a demonstration that imprisonment must be resisted and endured by offenders and their families because it will always be violent and destructive.Wheat Kings similarly can be interpreted as a call to reform remedies for the wrongly convicted and to make legal determinations of innocence.At the same time, Wheat Kings exonerated David Milgaard in 1992 long before the Canadian legal system did.In doing so, it illustrates how art, like media and science, can resist the coercive conclusions of the criminal law and can make normative conclusions that can be seen as a form of law.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.038 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".