The Caroline Affair in the Evolving International Law of Self-Defense
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The "Caroline" incident – an 1837 raid by British Canadian militia across the Niagara River border to sink an American steamboat being used by Canadian insurgents – is well-known to many international lawyers. United States Secretary of State Daniel Webster’s resulting correspondence with British representative Lord Ashburton is often cited today as a key authority on customary international self-defense standards. University of Ottawa professor Craig Forcese has produced a valuable new history and analysis of that event, its legal context, and its continuing influence: "Destroying the Caroline: The Frontier Raid that Reshaped the Right to War." As explained in this review, the book corrects some misunderstandings about the incident and shows its continuing relevance to contemporary international legal debates about military force. It also helps in understanding this period of U.S. foreign relations law, especially with regard to powers of war and peace.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".