Uncertainty and Indecision in the Legal Regulation of Children: The Albertan Experience
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, the author uses Alberta legislation and case law to test two common perceptions held in relation to the historical treatment of children’s (legal) status in Canada: first, that legal regulation oscillates between welfare- and rights-oriented perspectives; second, that the same uncertainty in approach applies in relation to all regulation contexts, including child welfare and youth justice. These perceptions are often used as the baseline of analysis from one explores (any number of) recent developments in Canada, federally or provincially. Yet, examination of the Albertan experience calls into question the accuracy of this view of the shifting approach to the legal regulation of children's status. Using definitive cases from the Alberta courts, the author argues that neither of these perceptions accurately reflects the narrative of children’s status in Alberta. The article reveals the greater complexity of the changing approach to legal regulation of children’s lives. In addition, the article suggests that the nature of the uncertainty and ambivalence evidenced in court decisions and legislative reforms is context-dependent, but ultimately driven by tensions inherent within the modern conception of childhood. Consideration of the Albertan experience is particularly revealing because it was the Alberta courts that both introduced the concept of the “mature minor” into Canadian common law in the mid-1980s and then determined that child welfare legislation superseded the child’s common law status as decision-maker.[Written whilst the author was Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Alberta Faculty of Law, Canada.]
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.005 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".