Do constitutional rights matter? The impact of section 35 on Aboriginal and treaty rights in Canada.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Legal scholars have long debated the impact of constitutional provisions on rights protections. While it may seem intuitive that if a right exists in a written constitution, it will be interpreted and used by legal actors, this intuition does not provide any information about how the constitutional right will be used and whether its use will lead to the increased recognition and protection of the right and any subsequent political or social changes. In this dissertation, I empirically assess how constitutional provisions develop an impact on rights recognitions and protections through an interdisciplinary case study of section 35(1) of the Constitution Act, 1982, which recognizes and affirms existing Aboriginal and treaty rights in Canada. Based on my findings, I argue that section 35 illustrates how the constitutional incorporation of rights can contribute to social change by affecting rights recognitions and protections. I contend that section 35 added a new element to old debates about the recognition and protection of Aboriginal and treaty rights. It entrenched these rights in the highest law of the land and provided a reason beyond simple justice for recognizing and protecting them. This change in the status of Aboriginal and treaty rights presented Aboriginal and treaty rights activists, governmental elites, and judges with an opportunity to revise the level of recognition and protection afforded to Aboriginal and treaty rights. The Supreme Court of Canada then used section 35 to increase the level of recognition and protection afforded to Aboriginal and treaty rights by limiting the ability of governments to infringe on these rights. The Court's decisions on section 35 produced radiating effects, including policy and programmatic changes which enhanced the ability of Aboriginal peoples to exercise their rights. The increased capacity of some Aboriginal to exercise their rights in turn has generally improved their social and economic well being.
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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 | 0.011 | 0.030 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".