Historical Infringements of Aboriginal Rights: Sui Generis as a Tool to Ignore the Past
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The sui generis conception of Aboriginal rights provides tremendous opportunity for those rights to be defined by Aboriginal perspectives. Unfortunately, recent decisions from the Supreme Court of Canada exemplify a prejudicial use of this concept. In Tsilhqot’ in, the Court seemed to suggest that the unique nature of Aboriginal title meant a declaration of title does not operate retroactively. This suggestion disregards the notion that Aboriginal title has always existed and that rights are not created by court declaration. In other decisions, however, the Court ignores the sui generis concept and suggests that statutory limitation periods apply to past infringements of Aboriginal rights. The result is a severe restriction on the ability of Aboriginal peoples to seek remedies for past infringements of their lands, even after they have obtained a declaration of title. Moreover, the Court has failed to incorporate Aboriginal perspectives, including historical and ongoing discrimination, the devastating impacts associated with the loss of land, and the potential for Indigenous law to inform the concept of justice in these circumstances. Reliance on the sui generis concept in this manner devalues Aboriginal rights and undermines reconciliation as well as Aboriginal peoples’ faith in the Canadian legal system.
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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 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.040 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| 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".