Bibliographic record
Abstract
The provision of legal services for people in later life is an emerging area of legal specialism in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. In the United States, "Elder Law" legal practice is a "growth industry," with an increasing number of practitioners specialising in this area alone. For instance, the Canadian Bar Association now has a National Elder Law Section, which addresses the legal issues and problems of "the elderly." In the United Kingdom, "Elderly Client Law" is a similarly expanding field, with a national organisation, Solicitors for the Elderly, providing a forum for legal practitioners specialising in this area. The argument for the need for such specialist areas, both in terms of practice and academic inquiry, is that "elders" or "the elderly" have specific previously unmet legal needs associated with their age and are more affected by particular laws also because of their age, and that there are unique issues raised for lawyers in working with clients in later life. Drawing on feminist and gerontological critiques of status/identity-based approaches to equality, I develop the argument that the concepts of "Elder" and "Elderly Client" specialist legal practice, rather than empowering and enhancing the legal rights of older people, instead reinforce the stereotyping of people based on chronological age in general, and older people in particular, both in law and wider society. I propose that the terms "Elder" and "Elderly" are misleading, over-generalising terms linked to physical and cognitive frailty, dependency, and the medicalisation of older age, masking great diversity in functional ability among older people. These terms convey a false suggestion of homogeneity among older people whose identities actually cut across the social spectrum and vary widely according to not only those identities and their intersection, but also chronological age, cohort, and life course events.
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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 | 0.013 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.071 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.012 | 0.016 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".