Bibliographic record
Abstract
Chapter 5, “Canada’s Secession Reference and the Trickiness of Sovereign Speech,” looks at how a country without a declaration of independence becomes a global authority on how one can lawfully appear. Facing Quebec independence efforts in the 1990s, Canada’s highest court issued an advisory opinion on whether the province could unilaterally secede. In the absence of a founding document, the Supreme Court opted to read foundational principles out of constitutional history, beginning with Confederation in 1867. The principles it describes did not emerge from this event, however, but from the often difficult and disorderly conditions of coexistence before and since. Taking a broader view of history suggests a different interpretation of foundations. Instead of the stability and continuity the Court identified, it finds that Canadian constitutionalism is foundationally indebted to the failure of sovereign speech and the refusal of legal and constitutional imperative. Whereas the Court emphasized orderliness and rule of law, Indigenous law frames disorder as a constituent force, an idea captured in the figure of the Trickster. A certain trickiness in sovereign speech can prove both generative and disruptive when it comes to beginnings and may even help explain the Court’s own unusual choices.
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 | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.018 | 0.001 |
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".