‘The Crown Wears Many Hats’: Canadian Aboriginal Law and the Black-boxing of Empire
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this ambitious but earthbound critique of the ‘black-boxing of empire’, Mariana Valverde and Adriel Weaver adroitly trace the construction and deconstruction of the spectral <italic>corpus mysticum</italic> in Canadian legal discourse. The authors interrogate the weird legal agency of the Crown in aboriginal rights cases, disclosing the relentless production of novelty concealed beneath the conservative image of a continuous, eternal office and recalling the Latourian lesson about law’s <italic>soi disant</italic> homeostatic character: ‘even in this case [in which legal principles are modified], it will only be a matter of making the body of legal doctrine still more coherent, so that, in the last analysis, nothing will really have budged.’ These cases, Valverde and Weaver show, contract into themselves Canada’s colonial/postcolonial histories and the full weight of its legal tradition’s contradictory commitments. The sovereign gesture of recognition, offered by way of the ‘honour of the Crown’, paradoxically deprives the aboriginal nations so recognised of their very claim to existence, their nationhood: ‘the Canadian state now has obligations of sovereign/royal honour toward all aboriginal peoples … but the naming of those obligations simultaneously performs a kind of re-coronation of the very colonial sovereign whose servants caused so much harm to aboriginal peoples over the centuries’. Valverde and Weaver allow us to linger on this troubling sense of the uncanny, of the historical deja vu or phantasm of repetition that takes on materiality in the bilateral movement of the Crown through the networks of public law. It is a phantasm that reappears in the discursive techniques of judges that are, in fact, elaborating and reinventing precisely the discretionary doctrinal construct (‘honour of the Crown’) that they claim, instead, to merely appeal to, hearkening to an eternal spring of sovereign virtue through the mists of antiquity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".