Making Sense of “Insanity”: Law, Psychiatry, and the Royal Commission on the Law of Insanity as a Defence in Criminal Cases
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1954, the Canadian government established the Royal Commission on the Law of Insanity as a Defence in Criminal Cases. While its final report had little impact at the time, the creation of the commission points to the emergence of insanity as a newly complex problem within the context of postwar Canada. Spurred on by the growing psychiatric profession and the destabilization of capital punishment as a viable sentence, the commission quickly realized that the building blocks of its solution - legal and psychiatric expertise - were largely incompatible. This article explores the commission's problematization of insanity, which, far from providing solutions, highlighted the difficulties surrounding the integration of both psychiatric and legal knowledges of the day. The commission played an important role in upholding the status quo, and it provides an early example of the stasis that would characterize this area of the law until the early 1990s.
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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 | 0.009 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.118 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".