Conceptions of Harm in the Canadian Constitutional Adjudication of Religious Freedom
Bibliographic record
Abstract
My research examines the constitutional protection of religious freedom in Canada under section 2(a) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In particular, it considers how courts understand and apply the concept of harm in negotiating the boundaries of the right and in settling conflicts with other rights and social goals. The concept of harm is frequently invoked but rarely acknowledged by courts deciding constitutional religion cases, and is under-theorized in the academic work on religious freedom in Canada. I maintain that harm performs a crucial role at each stage of the constitutional analysis, both explicitly and implicitly, and that judges’ recourse to harm is often unthinking and reflexive. My research explores both this functional role that harm plays in the judgments, which I break down into its legitimating, jurisdictional and normative functions, and the particular conceptions of harm that are adopted by courts deciding on the reach of the section 2(a) rights provision. I consider harm’s function and meaning through the lens of critical approaches to the concept of harm developed in critical and feminist legal theory. I argue that despite the many challenges that can and should be levied against the use of harm as a legal construct, harm is so deeply embedded in the culture, doctrine and structure of Canadian constitutional law’s protection of religious freedom that it can be neither disregarded nor dismissed. It falls to courts to adopt a more critical and reflective approach to harm that works with rather than against the powerful pull to harm in religious freedom cases.
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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 | 0.009 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.032 | 0.078 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".