"Elder Law" and Conflicts of Interest in the United States and Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article considers the problem of conflicts of interest in elder law in the context of a larger discussion about elder law as a bounded legal subject. The problem of conflicts of interest is not particular to elder law. Conflicts, intentional and unintentional, have a special salience in this context, however. That salience is intensified by the expanded scope of "elder law" to include other classes of vulnerable clients, such as persons with disabilities. Despite the significance of conflicts as a real, perceived, or potential issue in this context, the issue has received relatively scant attention and discussion. This inattention to conflicts has distorted perceptions of elder law within the wider legal community, with unfortunate consequences for the development of elder law as a discrete field of practice and research. This article considers the issue of conflicts in the elder law discourse from both an American and Canadian perspective. Core practice areas for American elder law (areas not readily transportable to non-American jurisdictions) are areas in which the conflicts issue is especially prominent. From an international perspective, a perception may be created of elder law as a peculiarly American practice area, and one which is rife with real and potential conflicts that elder law practitioners-and those who would export the model-may prefer to ignore. This dynamic has frustrated the development of elder law as an international, multi-faceted, and interdisciplinary area of law. Confronting the issue of conflicts in elder law is an important first step in continuing the coherent development of elder law (perhaps within a rubric of law, policy and aging) as a bounded legal subject.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.035 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".