Rethinking the Role of Lawyers for Children : Child Representation in Canadian Family Relationship Cases
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines various methods for involving children in family and child welfare proceedings, surveys varying approaches in different Canadian jurisdictions to the appointment of counsel for children in these cases, and explores the controversies about the role of counsel for children. While child representation is becoming common, in most provinces it is usually limited to welfare proceedings involving older children. All jurisdictions, however, have some provisions to allow for child participation in family relationship cases. Governments and law societies in Canada should develop more coherent and comprehensive programs and policies to ensure that the views of children are considered in the family justice process in a child-focused and cost-efficient manner. There needs to be more recognition of the role of lawyers in facilitating settlement. Appointment of counsel is, however, not always the best way to involve children ; if the child is willing to share views, in some cases this may be better done by a judicial interview, a Views of the Child Report or an assessment. There should be a presumption that counsel will be an instructional advocate, but if a child lacks the capacity or willingness to instruct counsel, counsel should be an advocate for the rights and interests of the child. Regardless of the role adopted, counsel for a child also has responsibility for introducing significant evidence not otherwise before the court.
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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 | 0.047 | 0.078 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.036 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.007 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".