Role and Responsibilities of Counsel for the Child in Alberta: A Practitioner's Perspective and a Response to Professor Bala
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The representation of children and the role and responsibilities of counsel have recently become topics of discussion in Alberta. This dialogue includes consideration of whether, and in what situations, acting as a best-interests advocate, an amicus curiae, or a traditional advocate best meets the goal of reaching an outcome that serves the best interests of a child whose parents are engaged in family law and child protection disputes. This article proposes that the most appropriate role for counsel who represent children becomes obvious once the societal motivation for having such representation is clarified. In particular, counsel's role depends on whether children are accepted as rights-bearers, which also impacts the interpretation of statutory language, particularly "interests" and "best interests." and the test for capacity to instruct counsel. This analysis rejects Professor Bella's proposal that counsel should advocate their own opinions of the child's best interests because such an approach exceeds the training and expertise oflawyers and is not supported by current legal systems. The author joins Professor Bala in urging decision- and policy-makers to develop a coherent child representation program to address these and related issues.
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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 | 0.024 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.024 | 0.019 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".