Registering Cosmetics? The Constitution of Legal Form and Injurious Substance in Canada (1945–1946)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In midcentury Canada, legislative drafters, government lawyers, food and drug officials, and ministers grappled with cosmetics. Faced with constitutional concerns about cosmetic licensing, these actors drafted legislative amendments that would instead require cosmetics to be registered. In contrast to people or land, the registration of products, substances, or things has received little attention in sociolegal scholarship. Building on work investigating law's temporalities and materiality, this account traces how in-formed by the constitutional doctrine that apprehended substances through the legal form of prohibition, cosmetics were rendered in draft legislation as constituted of ingredients that may cause injury. Injury, in this account, is a material-temporal regime. Yet cosmetic injury was neither static nor singular, as it was catalysed differently by distinctive regulatory devices. This is shown by last-minute changes to the bill which retooled cosmetic registration, from an information extraction device for anticipating future harms, into a recording device for capturing latent harms.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".