The Regulation of Sexual History Evidence: A Historical-Doctrinal Study of its Origins, Judicial Treatment, and Contemporary Limitations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This is a long-term historical-doctrinal study of the law governing the admissibility of sexual history evidence. It begins in the period before 1982, when Canada’s original rape shield legislation was enacted. It (mostly) ends in 2000, when the Supreme Court held that Canada’s current rape shield legislation, enacted in 1992, was constitutional. (A brief coda to this thesis surveys more recent developments.) The historical parts of this thesis examine, among other things, the social and political processes that compelled Parliament to begin regulating the use of sexual history evidence, how a feminist defence of rape shield legislation was organized in the late-1980s amidst challenges to its constitutionality, and the legal and ideological contexts in which all this occurred. In telling this story, this thesis focuses largely on the lobbying and litigation efforts of self-consciously feminist legal actors, examining the nature and ideological origins of the legal claims they made to Parliament and the Supreme Court, and describing the receptivity of each of those institutions to those claims. The doctrinal parts of this thesis, which are weaved into its historical narrative, address two interrelated topics. First, they consider the extent to which the Supreme Court has over time understood the purpose of rape shield legislation in terms of women’s right to equal benefit and protection of the law, and how this has affected the Court’s assessment of it. Second, they engage with the way in which legal actors have historically understood the law around sexual history evidence as effecting a balance between the rights and interests of (a) people accused of sexual assault, (b) sexual assault complainants, and (c) Canadian society more generally. They also examine critically a more recent view that rape shield legislation does not, in fact, put these rights and interests into conflict. The purpose of this study is to work toward a comprehensive portrait of how this area of law has developed to its current form, in order to better understand its functioning and underlying purposes.
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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 | 0.025 | 0.035 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.085 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 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".