Hollick and Environmental Class Actions: Putting the Substance into Class Action Procedure
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Hollick is significant as the first environmental class action to reach the Supreme Court of Canada. Yet it is also important more broadly as an example of how the civil litigation process presents significant barriers to environmental litigants by its failure to grapple with the fundamental dynamics of environmental law. This paper will argue that class action certification decisions are not strictly procedural and that in environmental cases, a contextual approach, informed by the principles of environmental law, would require courts to consider the nature of environmental harm, those affected by it, and the requisite appropriate remedies. This would alter both the courts' approach to the certification test and the outcome of the cases. Hollick was not approached primarily as an environmental case, and as a result, the decision can be critiqued as a class action certification decision, as an environmental decision and as a nuisance decision.
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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 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.059 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.014 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".