Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article is a personal account of an immigration judge in the UK. The history of attitudes towards immigrants in the UK since the Edict of Nantes is briefly sketched along with the sporadic emergence of review systems of executive decisions concerning immigrants, both political and non-political, from the beginning of the twentieth century up to the current one introduced first in 1969. The article then looks at the sort of judges recruited at first and the subject matter of most of the appeals until 1993—visitors, students, overstayers, and those seeking settlement for work, for their families to join them, and for marriage. The article deals briefly with the development of the immigration law in this period through these sorts of cases and the issues and questions facing the judge at the time. It considers where we got our information from with its challenges and shortcomings: particularly the misunderstandings which arise in cross-cultural dialogue. The paper deals with the differences between a tribunal system in this particular jurisdiction, which adopts an adversarial approach, and the regular courts; and with the profound impact on a judge of having to adapt to decision making in such a milieu. It also tackles how these differences affect a judge’s approach, especially given the constraints imposed on his judicial independence. It also deals with the apparent changes over the years in the attitudes of judges in the tribunal, leaving a question mark over how far they are infl uenced by events and public opinion. Some of the perceived shortcomings of the tribunal system to decide immigration matters are set out in the context of what Stephen Sedley described as a “fear of public abuse or political displeasure, unwittingly favouring individuals who fit stereotypes with which I felt an affinity; affection (sympathy) or prejudice which may skew my judgment.” The demons which lurk in all systems of adjudication, asylum prominent among them, are called out by name in the judicial oath and the hope is expressed that lessons have been learned both as a judge and a person in the course of some twenty-two years in this jurisdiction.
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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 | 0.020 | 0.059 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.065 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.026 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.015 |
| Research integrity | 0.034 | 0.063 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.002 |
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".