Fifty Years of Canadian Legal History
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Fifty years ago Canadian legal history was very much in its infancy. What little had been published was in equal measure antiquarian, descriptive, and hagiographic. The field has undergone a profound transformation in the last half-century. We now know a great deal more about all aspects of our legal past, about our institutions, our legal personnel, and the substantive law. The field has also become much more sophisticated, concerned not only with internal legal developments but increasingly with the relationships between law and other aspects of Canadian history. Social history, labour history, women’s history, economic, intellectual, cultural and political history, to name but a few, have come to be central themes in legal history just as historians in those fields have integrated the law into their analyses. This article cannot survey the field over fifty years in a comprehensive way, but uses four areas to illustrate the increasing complexity, sophistication and importance of Canadian legal history. Here we examine in some detail the development of the literature in four areas: the history of Canadian courts and judges, women’s legal history, Indigenous peoples and the law, and the evolution of the civil law of Quebec within the broader framework of law in Canada. Each, albeit in different ways, demonstrates both that legal history and other forms of history are now effectively inseparable if one is to have a full and nuanced understanding of each.\nIl y a cinquante ans, l’histoire juridique canadienne en était à ses balbutiements. Le peu qui avait été publié était à parts égales ancien, descriptif et hagiographique. Ce domaine a connu une profonde transformation au cours des cinquante dernières années. Nous en savons aujourd’hui beaucoup plus sur tous les aspects de notre passé juridique, sur nos institutions, sur notre personnel juridique et sur le droit substantiel. Le domaine est également devenu beaucoup plus sophistiqué, s’intéressant non seulement aux développements juridiques internes mais aussi, de plus en plus, aux relations entre le droit et d’autres aspects de l’histoire canadienne. L’histoire sociale, l’histoire du travail, l’histoire des femmes, l’histoire économique, intellectuelle, culturelle et politique, pour n’en citer que quelques-unes, sont devenues des thèmes centraux de l’histoire du droit, tout comme les historiens de ces domaines ont intégré le droit dans leurs analyses. Cet article ne peut pas faire un tour d’horizon exhaustif du domaine sur cinquante ans, mais utilise quatre domaines pour illustrer la complexité, la sophistication et l’importance croissantes de l’histoire du droit au Canada. Nous examinons ici en détail l’évolution de la littérature dans quatre domaines : l’histoire des tribunaux et des juges canadiens, l’histoire juridique des femmes, les peuples autochtones et le droit, et l’évolution du droit civil du Québec dans le cadre plus large du droit au Canada. Chacun de ces domaines, bien que des manières différentes, démontre que l’histoire du droit et les autres formes d’histoire sont désormais inséparables si l’on veut avoir une compréhension complète et nuancée de chacun d’entre eux.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.012 | 0.016 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.029 | 0.003 |
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".