The DeLloyd Guth Visiting Lecture in Legal History: Writing Canadian Legal History: Origins
Bibliographic record
Abstract
n recent years I have been writing a legal history of Canada with two colleagues, Jim Phillips of the University of Toronto, and Blake Brown of St Mary's University in Halifax.We are planning to have the book come out in time for the 150th anniversary of Confederation in 2017.But Canada's legal history precedes Confederation by some centuries and includes the traditions of many First Nations as well as French, English, Scottish, and British inheritances.To throw out an impressive sounding number, we are dealing with half a millennium of Canadian legal history, from roughly 1500 to 2000.How does one make sense of developments in Canada's legal past, stretching over such a long time span, and covering such a vast portion of the continent?To situate the project in space and time, consider that by the end of the seventeenth century, there were two English and two French colonies in northern North America, spreading from the continent's easternmost extremity at Cape Spear, Newfoundland to the western shore of Hudson's Bay, a distance of some 2500 km, and from the post at Churchill in the north to Fort Detroit, founded in 1701, to the south.French and English control
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.028 | 0.003 |
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".