Limiting Lawyer Liberty: How the Statement of Principles Coerces Speech
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In December 2016, the benchers (‘governors’) of the Law Society of Ontario adopted a series of Equity and Diversity Initiatives (“EDIs”), including requiring a mandatory Statement of Principles (the “SOP”). Under the new rule, the “Law Society will require every licensee [that is, lawyer or paralegal] to adopt and to abide by a statement of principles acknowledging their obligation to promote equality, diversity, and inclusion generally, and in their behavior towards colleagues, employees, clients and the public.” Lawyers and paralegals who do not follow this approach will first receive warnings, followed by sanctions, including the potential loss of license to practice. While I agree with the values of equality, diversity and social inclusion, in this Article I claim that the SOP coerces a licensee’s speech, thought and conscience in harmful ways and makes it harder for lawyers to fulfill their duty of loyalty to their client. Accordingly, the SOP seems to infringe or violate, among other things, Charter-protected rights to freedom of expression and conscience. By doing so, the SOP encourages anti-democratic outcomes such as chilling dissent, and harms the pursuit of greater equality.
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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 | 0.028 | 0.088 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.051 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.017 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.016 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.020 | 0.005 |
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".