R' Blake Brown, A Trying Question: The Jury in\nNineteenth-Century Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In a 1984 review essay on the inter-relationship(s) oflaw and society in English criminal law historiography, Doug Hay observed that "in history, there is no 'background," His point was that there are an infinite number ofbackgrounds, all of which are moving and changing, often in non-linear fashion, at different paces, either in counter-point or direct dialogue with the foreground which is the immediate subject ofexposition. Legal historians who put their topics "in context" by treating the background as static are now fortunately few, at least when this background is conceived of as social or economic. But as Hay observed, the most immediately significant context for any area of legal history is often itself legal, and it is this legal context-the institutions, the rules of procedure and evidence--of which legal historians need to be the most aware, but often take for granted. Not that this is entirely our fault: while we have ample secondary sources on many non-law aspects of nineteenth century Canadian society, the nittygritty of the system has not attracted the same interest. While there are compelling stories about eccentric judges, or the consequential narratives these individuals produced, to be celebrated, excoriated or otherwise deconstructed, it is a brave researcher who chooses to devote him or herself to the dry bones of statutory changes to faceless structures such as the jury. Popular culture may imbue juries with drama galore, but this is necessarily fictional, since where reasoning and communication are the duty of (modem era) high court judges, that ofjurors has been discretion and opacity.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 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".