Reflections on the TRC’s Mandate to Law Schools: Microscopic and Macroscopic Changes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s [TRC] mandate to law schools is multi-faceted in its pedagogical substance and process. The mandate entails rejecting terra nullius and its associated colonial assumptions within Canadian law as taught and a new valorization of Indigenous legal orders. This change is challenging because it can implicate law school community members’ sense of individual personal and professional identities. Understanding the depth of these potential implications can help to explain TRC implementation as a long-term project, involving growth at both individual and institutional levels. To fulfill the TRC mandate, one law school changed the requirements for a law degree, including adding a class into the first year program. This addition was reviewed internally in 2023. The internal review identified several challenges; in particular, the course attempted to cover too many diverse topics and objectives within a single class. The course was also placing significant demands on instructors (and students) due to occurrences of interpersonal conflict and racism, as well as students’ disparate levels of background knowledge. Curriculum proposals were made that aimed to manage learner defensiveness, reduce instances of racism in communications, and decouple distinct topics and learner objectives from one another, allowing for more effective instruction, scheduling, and learning. By using a settler harm reduction approach to legal education, as well as the goals of decolonization and Indigenization, we explain the challenges identified in the internal review and responses proposed. We discuss change as a multilevel process and consider how individuals’ experiences can inform broader curriculum and institutional choices.
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 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 | 0.117 | 0.192 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.018 | 0.025 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".