Evidence Not in a Form Familiar to Common Law Courts: Assessing Oral Histories in Land Claims Testimony after Delgamuukw v. B.C.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Supreme Court of Canada's recent decision in Delgamuukw v. B.C. permits a reconsideration of the place of oral traditions in aboriginal land claims cases. The Court advises that oral histories be given "independent weight," and that at trial McEachern C.J. had not "assessed the oral histories correctly. " However, the Supreme Court of Canada's view of how to weigh oral history in testimony is troublesome, in that then-Chief Justice Lamer informs us that such key features of oral histories as "moral obligations " are "tangential to the ultimate purpose of the fact-finding process at trial — the determination of the historical truth." This article considers how courts will be able to evaluate oral histories in the future, if such key features of testimony are to be discarded.
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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 | 0.010 | 0.057 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".