Potential value: a challenge to the quantification of damages for loss of earning capacity for female and aboriginal plaintiffs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis questions why young female and aboriginal plaintiffs consistently receive lower damage awards for loss of future earning capacity than young white male plaintiffs. I argue that due to the social construction of law, and specifically tort law, the dividing line between public and private law should be challenged. The effect of tort is partially "public" in nature due to the broad impact tort has on valuing the potential of individual plaintiffs. When damages for female and aboriginal plaintiffs are assessed on a reduced scale due to gender and race, a message is sent that the potential of these plaintiffs, and the potential of the groups to which they belong, is somehow less. Due to the "public" impacts of damages quantification, principles of equality derived from the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms should be considered in the quantification process. I argue further, that the current practice of damages quantification has been the result of the court's over-reliance on "formalist" notions of tort law which has insulated the area from the social context of law. In addition, I suggest that the acceptance by courts of economic evidence, which is often reflective of discriminatory norms in the labour market and our society generally, has had the effect of de-valuing certain members of Canadian society; in particular women and aboriginal plaintiffs. I demonstrate this analysis through an examination of cases dealing with young, catastrophically injured, female and aboriginal plaintiffs. Finally, I suggest that, though an imperfect solution, currently the only equitable method of quantifying damages for loss of future earning capacity is to adopt white male earning tables for all young plaintiffs with no demonstrated earning history.
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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 | 0.030 | 0.069 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".