The litigant in person and the access to justice dilemma : quo vadis South Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In recent years much attention has been given to the ever-increasing phenomenon of litigants in person (also referred to as self-represented litigants or pro se litigants) in civil practice within common law countries, particularly in the United States of America, Canada, Britain and Australia. Although the common law has long accepted a litigant’s right in civil proceedings to litigate in person, legal representation has more or less been the norm for centuries. Despite a substantial body of research material that has been steadily building up around various aspects of self-represented litigants, many questions have still not been answered definitively, including the reason for the growth of this phenomenon. However, what is certain is that this phenomenon is placing all aspects of the various justice systems under tremendous pressure, including the adversary system itself. Although various common law countries have made huge strides in trying to understand the phenomenon, the various role players in South Africa’s judicial administration have paid little or no attention to litigants in person (despite a regular appearance of such litigants in our courts). As it is probably only a matter of time before our legal system comes under the same pressure experienced elsewhere, it is the purpose of this article to offer proposals to first, ameliorate and secondly, to manage the consequences of such expected pressure based on the experience of other common law countries.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".