Controversy about the Role of Children's Lawyers: Advocate or Best Interests Guardian? Comparing Practices in Two Canadian Jurisdictions with Different Policies for Lawyers
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.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There is controversy about the role that lawyers for children should play in family proceedings, but little empirical research about what they actually do. This article reports on a study (n = 166) of the experiences and perspectives of lawyers in two Canadian provinces with different policies for the role of children's counsel. Official policies seem to have only a limited impact on the practices of lawyers for children, whether the policies direct lawyers to adopt a best interests guardian or a traditional instructional advocate role. Lawyers generally seem more comfortable adopting an instructional advocacy role, especially with older children. Lawyers who represent children comment on the deep satisfaction that they feel from this work. This article compares the practice of lawyers in the two jurisdictions on a number of issues related to child clients and proposes policy changes to provide better guidance and education for children's lawyers. Keypoints for the Family Court Community This survey of lawyers in these two jurisdiction reveals: lawyers spend longer meeting with older children; that official policies have some impact on the practice of lawyers, but a significant number of lawyers decide for themselves what role they will play; lawyers generally seem more comfortable adopting an instructional advocacy role, especially with older children; lawyers in the jurisdiction where they are expected to adopt a best interests role are more likely to tell parents and the court that they were adopting this role when they were in fact advocating what the child wanted; In both jurisdictions about one fifth of the lawyers reported that they had disclosed a child's “secret” to prevent harm to the child.
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 imitationNot 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.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it