Bibliographic record
Abstract
The dominant view of self-help is that it is a remedy exercised by individuals as an alternative to seeking state-sanctioned aid. In other words, self-help consists in ‘legally permissible conduct that individuals undertake absent the compulsion of law and without the assistance of a government official in efforts to prevent or remedy a legal wrong.’ Indeed, self-help is often vaunted as an efficient, or at least potentially efficient, alternative to the slower, costlier, and more cumbersome civil justice system. In our world of increasingly exorbitant legal costs, in which few have meaningful access to the civil justice system, remedies that can be initiated and executed without prohibitive expense merit scholarly attention. Notwithstanding this potential promise, the legal scholarship on self-help is meagre, and, moreover, just what behaviour counts as self-help is left unclear. Self-help, as it is currently understood, risks becoming a meaningless term, a cipher through which almost any behaviour initiated by an individual in furtherance of her legal rights can count as self-help. This article defends a narrower conception of self-help than that recommended by the dominant view. In so doing, it clarifies some of our misgivings about, and checks some of our hopes for, self-help. Self-help, properly understood, is not an alternative to the civil justice system. It is a privilege to act vis-à-vis another in a certain way when certain circumstances exist, and its exercise is always defeasible to a final determination by a court. Self-help, in other words, is not equivalent to taking the law into one’s own hands, as some have implied. This conclusion should comfort those who might worry about the extra-legal nature of self-help and who ask with some trepidation how the unilateral action of one individual can determine the scope and existence of the rights of another. Based on this article’s understanding of self-help, it simply cannot. This conclusion, however, might disappoint those who hope that self-help can be a part of the solution to our current access-to-justice crisis. If it is not a true alternative to the civil justice system, then the specter of costly, inefficient litigation and adjudication remains.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.043 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.002 |
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".