Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the last fifteen years, courts throughout the commonwealth have been struggling to redefine the scope of malicious prosecution. The vexing question is whether the cause of action may lie for wrongful administrative and civil proceedings, or whether it is restricted to criminal ones. This is exemplified by a number of divergent judgments in the United Kingdom and Australia, which are very difficult to reconcile on principled grounds. This paper brings the Canadian experience to bear on this issue through an empirical analysis of cases from Ontario, which extended malicious prosecution to administrative proceedings 25 years ago and thus offers a natural experiment of the implications of broadening the tort. This analysis shows that fears about opening the floodgates of litigation are unsubstantiated. Most claims in the sample did not make it to trial and three-quarters of them were dismissed. Furthermore, defendants usually prevailed on pre-trial motions to dismiss, which suggests that baseless claims may be disposed of quickly. Not surprisingly, the most common ground for dismissal was absence of malice, which indicates that the tort is sufficiently onerous to keep it in check. In addition to this empirical analysis, the article examines both the early and more recent case law, concluding that defining the scope of the tort based on the nature of the underlying proceeding is unsupportable. Specifically, such a categorical approach produces inconsistent and arbitrary outcomes that have little to do with the tort’s policy rationale. And malicious prosecution fills a real gap in the law because other torts do not apply, meaning that without it victims of wrongful administrative or civil proceedings would be left uncompensated.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.004 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".