Ban on religious symbols in the public service: Quebec’s Bill 21 in a global pluralist perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Bill 21 is a highly contested law adopted in Quebec that bans certain civil servants from wearing religious symbols in the exercise of their duties. Rather than analyse Bill 21 on its merits, the article treats it as a test case for global legal pluralism, examining how the validity of the law from an international perspective depends on the frames one uses to analyse it. It finds that a basic tension permeates the entire debate between a universalist vision of rights and a vision of rights as anchored in particular political configurations that demand a constant process of adaptation. That tension is visible in the dualist opposition between Canadian and international law; in the role of federalism as a significant mediating factor in the implementation of constitutional and international rights; and in the kind of majoritarian check on rights that manifests itself in the Canadian Charter of Rights’ ‘notwithstanding clause’. Throughout, the article explores how these tensions might be mediated in ways that do not simply oppose international and domestic law but seek to make the most of their interaction.
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 | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".