Governing Through Harm to Promote Liberal Values: The Canadian Approach to Obscenity and Indecency Following R. v. Labaye
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper traces the history of the Supreme Court of Canada’s construction of harm(s) tests in the context of its obscenity and indecency jurisprudence from Hicklin (1868) through Labaye (2005). At the core of these tests is a functionality linked to presumptive societal norms. The contemporary harm assemblages are risk-based, and concern the maintenance of cohesion, organized in relation to the impact of obscenity or indecency on abstract political values rather than concretized sexual subjects. What is more, the Labaye Court has constituted an expanded harms-based test which reifies risk of harm as tantamount to proven harm while propagating the nimble lie that Courts are required to rely on expert opinion evidence of harm, when the Courts, in fact, rely on their own judgment. Ultimately, the Court is still concerned in the main with the proper functioning of society, targeting those whose conduct is deemed harmful to a particular view of society.
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 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 | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.057 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.012 |
| 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".