Between Freedom and Neutrality: Servatius v Alberni School District and the Problem of Judicial Gaslighting
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the 2015/2016 school year an Indigenous smudge and an indigenous dance and prayer were performed at the John Howitt Elementary School in Port Alberni, BC. Ms. Candice Servatius, whose son and daughter went to the school, petitioned the court to declare that these events violated her and children’s religious freedom and the state’s duty of religious neutrality, as protected in section 2(a) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In 2020, the BC Supreme Court dismissed her petition. In 2022, the BC Court of Appeal upheld the trial decision. Although I do not necessarily disagree with the outcome of the case, I argue that the reasoning of both courts is flawed. Both courts interpreted and applied the doctrines of religious freedom and religious neutrality in ways that downplayed and overlooked the essence of Ms. Servatius’s claim, which was that what happened at the school affected her and her children spiritually. These doctrines must recognize and respect the religious perspective of the claimant. Failing to do so skews both doctrines and amounts to what I call “judicial gaslighting.” Through a close and critical examination of the Servatius decisions I explore challenging doctrinal questions about the role that the subjective religious perspective of a claimant plays in the law of religious freedom and religious neutrality. How is the claimant’s religious perspective protected without overwhelming all other considerations in a case? I identify and discuss the persisting challenges and the possible solutions to help avoid the problem of judicial gaslighting.
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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 | 0.009 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 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".