Special advocates and amici curiae in national security proceedings in the United Kingdom
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article considers the use of special advocates (SAs) in the United Kingdom in ‘closed material proceedings’ (CMPs) – that is, proceedings where the court relies on evidence that is not shown to one or more of the parties (closed material) in reaching its decision on the substantive issues in the case. It charts the development of CMPs from 1997 to the present day and examines some of the criticisms made of them, including by SAs instructed in them. From the perspective of a barrister with experience of acting in CMPs, this article identifies three particular examples of the difficulties that have arisen in practice in understanding the proper role of SAs and their effect on the way proceedings are conducted by judges: first, the conflict that can arise between the function of acting in the interests of the excluded party (generally, the role of the SA) and that of assisting the court (the traditional role of an amicus curiae); second, whether and to what extent SAs can make CMPs fair; and, third, the extent to which CMPs and SAs should play a part in appellate proceedings.
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 | 0.019 | 0.053 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.008 |
| 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".