The Quebec consumer : study on the emergence of a legal figure
Bibliographic record
Abstract
At the turn of the 1970s, the first Quebec jurists to interpret the new consumer law did not hesitate to present the consumer as a “natural” result of the major social transformations imposed by the development of the “consumer society”. Born with this new society, this consumer is, to them, its poor child; inexperienced and without any financial power, he is a passive participant of the market, the one who can only consume what is offered to him, under the conditions offered to him. According to these jurists, the “drafters” of the Quebec consumer law created it with this “self-evident” representation of the consumer as a buyer who is subjected to the market. Half a century after the emergence of the consumer in the Quebec legal field, this thesis proposes to revisit this naturalistic conception. By adopting an historical approach, which conceives the character as a political construct, it first seeks to reconstitute the figure of the consumer that the drafters had in mind, in the 1970s. By reconstructing the different stages of the development that produced it, this essay aims, moreover, to explain the reasons for this conception. What figure of the consumer do they formalize? What factors contributed to their choice at the expense of other possibilities? In addition to outlining an answer to these questions, by reconstructing the history of this representation, this thesis is an opportunity to put the emphasis on a fundamental element of consumer law, which is often left in the blind spot of the discourse of jurists : its political foundations.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.019 | 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".