Tragic and comic myths in Canadian ‘tar sands’ jurisprudence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Peter Fitzpatrick in The Mythology of Modern Law argued that modern Western law is substantively and operationally mythic, constituted paradoxically by a negation of myth.1 Fitzpatrick’s claim is visible in the context of recent legal cases on extraction and development in the Alberta tar sands region of Canada, one of the world’s largest oil reserves.2 Through its contribution to anthropogenic climate change, extraction in this region has the capacity to bring about the apocalyptic ‘end’ that haunts the settler colonial imaginary. Using John Morreall’s understanding of the comic and tragic worldviews,3 I argue that recent settler legal judgements relating to extraction in the tar sands region can be interpreted as works of tragedy – characterised by intellectual rigidity, teleological storylines, and a death- and suffering-oriented sense of doom. However, there are ‘Other’ myths and narratives interwoven into the texts of these judgements – those of Indigenous people and allied activists whose work interrupts and subverts the “negative mythology” of settler Canadian law.4 These land defenders and activists insert elements of the comic worldview into the tragic tales of settler law and introduce the mythic figure of the trickster into the courtroom.5 These comic narrative elements can help audiences of settler law grapple critically with the sacred and spiritual tenets that undergird and animate the Canadian legal system, yet tend to avoid direct interrogation. The irreverence of the comic worldview further offers us a means of understanding law as just one myth amongst a broader constellation of myths – this is important as the threats posed by the climate crisis require the fundamental tenets of modern law to be subordinated to other, more life-oriented storylines and ideals.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 teacher head, 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".