MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W1505551132

Class Actions: The Canadian Experience

2001· article· en· W1505551132 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueDuke journal of comparative & international law · 2001
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldBusiness, Management and Accounting
TopicDispute Resolution and Class Actions
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsClass actionPunitive damagesDamagesPolitical scienceCivil procedureCommissionEconomic JusticeLawClass (philosophy)State (computer science)
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

In the last seven years, Canada has developed a vigorous class action regime. Before outlining that regime, I would like to address the question: Why have Class Actions? I. WHY HAVE CLASS ACTIONS? A foundational document in Canada on class actions is the Ontario Law Reform Commission's (OLRC) Report on Class Actions (1982).(1) It is an excellent three volume report that bases its recommendation of the introduction of class actions in Ontario on three underlying policy objectives. The first, and most important objective, is to afford greater access to justice. Litigation has become so expensive that claims of modest amounts, and even those of significant amounts, are not economically feasible to pursue on an individual basis. In class action terminology, these are referred to as non-viable claims. There are many more individually non-viable claims in Canada than in the United States for several reasons: (1) Canada has ceilings on damages for pain and suffering in personal injury cases, and relative to awards in the United States, these ceilings are very low;(2) (2) Canadian courts rarely award punitive damages,(3) (3) the vast majority of civil actions in Canada are tried by judges sitting alone rather than being tried by relatively uncontrolled juries as in the United States;(4) and (4) Canada has a fee shifting rule (generally the losing party must pay a large part of the winning party's legal fees), which is a major deterrent to litigation.(5) The second policy objective is to improve judicial efficiency. Where the alternative to a class action is repetitive litigation relating to the same events, the result is judicial inefficiency. For example, when class action certification was refused for claims against Canada's blood system relating to transfusion-related AIDS transmission,(6) more than eighty such cases were filed in Ontario alone. The filing of individual claims resulted in three very long trials without significant plaintiff-wide settlements.(7) Such individual actions often cover the same ground time and again; they are not only inefficient, but can lead to inconsistent decisions. It is noteworthy that the judicial efficiency rationale really only comes into play where the claims asserted are individually viable; permitting class actions for individually nonviable claims brings about litigation which would, without class actions, never be brought. This may increase the judicial workload and thereby decrease judicial efficiency. The third policy objective is to achieve behavioral modification. When manufacturers and other entities can inflict small amounts of damage on a large number of people who cannot afford to litigate individual claims, the deterrent function of the law, such as tort law, is lost. Hopefully, subjecting potential defendants to the risk of a class action will modify their behavior. Canadian courts refer to the above social or policy objectives constantly when interpreting class action legislation.(8) II. ARE THERE WORKABLE ALTERNATIVES TO CLASS ACTIONS IN THE CANADIAN CONTEXT? For certain types of personal injury claims, Canada has non-class action solutions. These, however, are not tailored specifically to widespread injury problems. First, part of Canada's social safety net is a national, government-run medicare system. The medicare system provides health care for all Canadians, including the medical and hospitalization expenses of injured persons.(9) Second, some Canadian provinces have introduced automobile accident insurance schemes that provide accident victims with benefits on a no-fault basis and without having to sue in court.(10) Third, for several decades, all provinces have had worker's compensation legislation, providing persons suffering from work-related injuries with compensation on a no-fault basis and forbidding resort to the courts in relation to such injuries. This explains why Canada, unlike the United States, has not had asbestosis litigation. …

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.983
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.001
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.076
GPT teacher head0.329
Teacher spread0.253 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it