Laughing at Law: A Case for Comic Jurisprudence in the Climate Crisis
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Critical legal scholars and activists do a lot with law: we ‘trash’ it, we resist it, we dissect it, we occasionally (reluctantly) appeal to it — we also laugh at it, albeit less systematically. This laughter, I argue, is valuable — and we would benefit from making a method out of it. I show how this might be done with reference to a rambling and ongoing legal story: the 56 judgements related to Indigenous and allied opposition to Canada’s notoriously controversial Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion project. Interpreting this as a chain novel of sorts (with a cast of characters that would put Tolstoy to shame), I demonstrate how engaging with law through a comic lens can help us ‘deal’ with the seeming immovability of modern Western law’s most self- (and other-) destructive tendencies in the context of the climate crisis. This comic mode/mood of engagement — characterised by flexibility and life-orientation — stands in contrast to the rigidity and linearity of the tragic vision that dominates modern Western law. The comic vision shows us that we can engage fruitfully with a tragic, coercive law by declining to take it seriously — because, ultimately, this law can be ‘tricked’ into serving higher objectives than its own rule.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it