Sovereignty Made Present: A Political Theology Of Canadian Constitutional Originalism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis develops an analogy between Canadian expressions of constitutional originalism, on the one hand, and American evangelical practices of interpreting the Bible as their holy scripture, on the other. It does so in defence of a comparative claim: there is something substantively similar about the way originalists read the Canadian Constitution and the way American evangelicals read the Protestant Bible in that they both do so theologically. Drawing on the political theology literature, this thesis develops that claim with sustained reference to originalist and evangelical interpretive methods and motives. At the level of method, constitutional originalism represents a reconstructive effort to identify and operationalize the historical decisions through which the Constitution’s drafters formulated its final wording; and, at the level of motive, to an assertive effort to identify on that basis the Canadian citizenry’s “sovereign self,” of which the originalist interpreter is one part, as the Constitution’s ultimate author.
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.038 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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".