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Record W4400067554 · doi:10.26443/glsars.v3i1.1398

Law as Prejudice: Codifying the Other

2024· article· en· W4400067554 on OpenAlexfundaboutno aff
Isabella Spano

Bibliographic record

VenueMcGill GLSA Research Series · 2024
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicLaw in Society and Culture
Canadian institutionsnot available
FundersGovernment of Canada
KeywordsPrejudice (legal term)LawPolitical sciencePsychologySociology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Recalling the theme of the present Research Series Law and Prejudice, this closing article harnesses the conceptual framework proposed by Everett Zimmermann in his semantic analysis of “Pride and Prejudice” to examine the interplay between law, pride, and prejudice. In Zimmermann, “pride” and “prejudice” are both opposite and interconnected qualities, like communicating vessels characterized by the same egoistic “self” as their core. Transposing this analysis into the legal domain, the article explores how the law, akin to “pride,” can reproduce the latter’s characteristics of detachment and perceived superiority, ultimately facilitating attempts at codifying “prejudice.” In this dynamic, the law—through its normative power and façade of objectivity—can become an instrument of marginalization, segregation, and discrimination. This article contends that the law’s supposed objectivity and normative authority transform it into a tool of superiority, not unlike pride in Zimmermann. By examining this dynamic, the article reveals how the law has been used numerous times to justify and normalize prejudice, creating the paradigm of “law as prejudice,” beyond “law as pride.” Through the lens of “othering,” the article illustrates how the law segregates by codifying the differences between “the Self” and “the Other,” sometimes under the guise of protection or benevolence, thereby justifying exclusion and discrimination. The analysis is anchored in the case study of the Canadian settler policies of assimilation of Indigenous Peoples, which show the destructive normative power of the “law as prejudice” paradigm. The article offers insights into the complex relationship between law, pride, and prejudice, and the pivotal role of the egoistic Self as “lawmaker of othering.”

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.006
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.010
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.147
Threshold uncertainty score0.293

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0060.010
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0040.002
Science and technology studies0.0120.070
Scholarly communication0.0150.013
Open science0.0020.008
Research integrity0.0040.006
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0040.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.121
GPT teacher head0.446
Teacher spread0.325 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2024
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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