The Court System in a Time of Crisis: COVID-19 and Issues in Court Administration
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
Canadian courts, in many ways, are neither efficient nor effective. This has been clear for many years. This article looks broadly at how little attention has been paid to court administration in the past, especially during times of crisis, and examines the impact the current pandemic may have on the future of Canadian court administration. In this vein, we examine emergency plans in general before turning to pandemic-specific plans and how, especially in Canada, these have been found wanting during this current crisis. Like most organizations, courts have developed plans – business contingency (BCPs) in Canada and continuity of operation (COOPs) in the United States—laying out policies and processes to follow in an emergency. Yet none of the various disaster plans created by courts in both Canada and the United States highlight the role and importance technology would play. Despite the increasing use of remote access for hearings—there has been a great deal of success in scheduling appeal hearings remotely—most courts have been unable to operate at pre-pandemic levels. In fact, most courts have postponed the majority of their hearings and have had to push dockets forward. Postponing a large portion of the courts’ hearings will undoubtedly add to a backlog of cases and increase the administrative burden on operations once physical distancing is removed. But the change in attitude that has taken place over the past few months is arguably greater than the sum of all changes made over the last forty years since Carl Baar’s reference to courts being “horse-and-buggy” organizations. The pandemic has provided a perfect occasion—no doubt forced but relatively low-risk—to try new things. Our position is that steps need to be taken to ensure that an increased reliance on “privileged access to technology” during COVID-19 does not lead to an “exacerbation of denial of access to justice.”
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.
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 | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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