Let Law Be Law, and Let Us Critique: Teaching Law to Undergraduate Students of Criminal Justice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Pedagogy at law school in Canada typically follows a regimented structure. Apart from core courses, students are introduced to the mechanics of how to read, write and interpret law. Course offerings are said to equip the student with legal literacy, preparing the first year law student to engage in the various fundamentals of the first year core curriculum. Undergraduate teaching of law outside of the law school context does not provide the same rudimentary preparation. The most pressing issue in undergraduate teaching is usually the legal illiteracy of most undergraduate students whom are new to the field of law. An introductory criminal law course in a liberal arts university could never provide the kind of introduction to legal literacy that formal legal education mandates. The challenge then is for the instructor to provide a lens of analysis for the undergraduate student in order to make law valuable outside of the context of the goals of the legal profession. This essay examines strategies that undergraduate law teachers (outside of law school) can use to make meaningful the study of the criminal law for students who may never be bound for law school. In some ways the undergraduate law teacher is advantaged over the law professor in that she does not need to be bound by a positivistic faith in law’s ability to solve problems. This ability to move outside of the self-contained nature of law allows for the potential of a civics education that is informed, critical and inherently analytical. These skills allow the teacher to find a new purpose for the teaching of law, which has ramiications for the manner in which one teaches and conducts research.
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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".