Supreme Court of Canada Constitutional Cases 2007: Defining Access to Justice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Taking a broad approach to the meaning of “access to justice”, to include not only physical and financial access to courts and tribunals, and capacity to enforce or establish rights, but also the use of the legal system to claim a share in the “goods” and realization of the values that are said to characterize Canadian society, the author analyzes several decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada in 2007 that relate to access to justice in different ways. Christie and Little Sisters (No. 2) involve the question of financial barriers to accessing the legal system; the result in both cases is inconsistent with the Court’s aspirational statements about the importance of access to justice. Both cases also illustrate the significance of how the case is framed. Alliance for Marriage and Family v. A. (A.) confirms that “access to justice” does mean that “outsiders” cannot prolong a matter, at least in litigation between private parties; the author queries, however, whether there would be the same result had the case been framed as raising constitutional, public interest issues. In Bruker v. Marcovitz, the majority’s decision treats religion as the incidental subject matter of the contract at issue, the reby ensuring that Ms Bruker is able to enforce her claim in the courts; the dissent seeks to maintain the separation between religion and the secular courts by making the religious matter the core of the case dispute. The author suggests that the majority’s decision may have less value than the dissent’s in establishing the parameters of access to substantive justice for future cases that explicitly or implicitly pose a tension between equality and freedom of religion. The 2007 jurisprudence generally does not lead to an increase in access to justice.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.023 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.023 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.022 | 0.015 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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".