Private Oppression: An Account of Motive and Purpose in Anglo-Canadian Private Liability
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The role of subjective intent, motive, and purpose in the assignment of private liability in interpersonal disputes remains a point of uncertainty and dispute in contemporary Anglo-Canadian jurisprudence and commentary. Notwithstanding a preponderance of academic interventions and decisions of the highest authority to the effect that an actor’s subjective intent, motive, or purpose plays no justifiable part in classifying private conduct as wrongful, several causes of action which make either express or implicit use of a subjective element as a prerequisite for the imposition of liability persist in Anglo-Canadian tort law, including the torts of libel, slander, malicious falsehood, slander to title, conspiracy to harm, watching and besetting, and private nuisance of the sort found in Hollywood Silver Fox Farm Ltd v Emmett.This dissertation takes the presence in Anglo-Canadian common law of such bases of private liability seriously. As human artifice created and refined over the course of centuries, the existence of these tort doctrines is taken to be presumptively intelligible, explicable, and significant in and to a broader system of private liability. As such, the account advanced makes two foundational assumptions: that all such tort doctrines respond to and manifest identical normative content, and that this shared normative content can be theorized in a fashion that accords with dominant rights-based accounts of the balance of Anglo-Canadian tort liability. Proceeding from these assumptions, this dissertation develops and illustrates two complementary positions. The first, using a core case approach centred on the defamation torts, articulates an understanding of the structures of the torts of private oppression as reflecting a shared treatment of subjective intent, motive, and purpose. The second, using an interpretive approach, explains the internal logic of a single theorized interpersonal entitlement all such tort doctrines can be understood as operating to protect from encroachment by others: juridical personhood. Together, these two accounts identify a coherent doctrinal group within Anglo-Canadian tort law, the torts of private oppression, and provide a theoretical account of the normative phenomenon to which that doctrinal group responds, private oppression, that is demonstrably reconcilable with leading rights-based accounts of Anglo-Canadian tort liability.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.043 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".