Settling for Less: How the Rules of Civil Procedure Overlook the Public Perspective of Justice
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper explores the conflict between settlement and the public goals of civil justice by considering the effects of certain Rules of Civil Procedure in Ontario. By evaluating the goals of Rules 24.1 (mandatory mediation), 49.10 (cost consequences of settlement offers), and 50 (pre-trial conferences) and what they achieve for both the private and public perspectives of justice, this essay argues that our Rules overlook public goals in favour of private ones. In attempting to honour party autonomy and improve the dispute resolution aspects of our civil justice system – in particular, achieving just results for litigants in an efficient and cost-effective manner – these rules result in uncertainty for future litigants and non-litigants alike, and serve to exacerbate existing inequalities. Furthermore, the rules in question do not necessarily improve the efficiency of our legal system in the long term, and, while improving access to dispute resolution, do not necessarily improve access to justice. The Rules appear to prioritize quantity of justice over quality, and a better balance is warranted between private and public goals in our civil justice system. In the end, this essay proposes a re-evaluation of the Rules of Civil Procedure to diminish the push for settlement; providing a mechanism for opting in to settlement would respect party autonomy and allow for efficient dispute resolution, but would not discourage parties from going to trial when it is in the best interest of the parties and the public. The final version of this article was published in the Advocates' Quarterly in December, 2011.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 it