The Paradox of Canadian Progress: A History of Law in Canada, Volume Two, Law for the New Dominion, 1867–1914, Jim Phillips, Philip Girard & R Blake Brown (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
and R Blake Brown humbly claim that their work offers nothing new to historians, but their book, A History of Law in Canada, Volume Two: Law for the New Dominion, 1867-1914, 1 proves otherwise.This 616-page masterwork brings together the actors, norms, and processes of the time with encyclopedic precision, capturing Canada's unsettling path to modernity and the pivotal role of law in this transformation.Much like its predecessor, 2 this volume promises to be an invaluable resource for researchers and a touchstone for future scholars. II. THEMESFollowing the methodology of the first volume, the authors forgo a formal thesis, opting instead to guide the reader through this history using two themes: (1) legal pluralism; and (2) the tension between liberty and order.3 These themes frame events and details, making the historical evidence more understandable.The pluralism theme delves into the co-existence of distinct legal traditions within Canada: Indigenous law, Quebec civil law, and Canadian common law. 4 Settlers largely dismissed Indigenous law, becoming increasingly assured that the "oral transmission and traditional practices" of Indigenous governance were merely "folkloric and not real law," allowing them to frame assimilation efforts as virtuous attempts to prepare Indigenous peoples for a modern world.5 For these reasons, Indigenous law "went into partial eclipse during this period."6 Quebec civil law, by contrast, flourished.Although the British firmly believed that spreading their civilization would "aid" others, 7 their French subjects in Canada posed deeper
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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 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.014 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.042 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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".