Lifting the “American Exceptionalism” Curtain: Options and Lessons from Abroad
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Contrary to its public rhetoric promising “justice for all” and “equal justice under law,” access to civil justice in the United States is “exceptional” only in a negative sense. The Rule of Law Index ranks our nation next to last among the world’s thirty-one “richest” countries. A major reason for this is that most of our fellow industrial democracies have a right to counsel in civil cases and invest from three times to ten times more than the United States on civil legal aid. Beyond these differences, the United States has much to learn from research and other developments in foreign countries. Studies in England about how poor and moderate income deal with their justiciable problems suggest that unmet “effective demand” for lawyer services is substantially less than unmet “legal needs” recorded in legal needs studies—because even with a right to counsel many people instead resolved their problems in other ways. A study in Canada found that those in the upper income quartile spent 167 times more than those in the bottom quartile resolving their legal problems, even though their problems often were less disruptive than those the bottom quartile confronted. A survey of past and present innovations covers the following: (1) Belgium’s problematic system that encourages individual lawyers to provide as much representation as they can while at the same time limiting what the government will pay out for the total amount of legal services rendered each year; (2) Dutch “lokets,”a nationwide network of offices where people can receive advice and brief assistance from a paralegal staff; (3) Dutch “Rechtwijzer 1.0 and 2.0,” online dispute assistance and online dispute resolution; (4) English “McKenzie friends” which allows nonlawyers to accompany unrepresented litigants to the courtroom and render limited assistance; and (5) partially subsidized lawyers for the lower middle classes and legal expense insurance for the middle classes found in several European countries.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.001 |
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".