The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities: Beginning to Examine the Implications for Canadian Lawyers' Professional Responsiblities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (hereafter the CRPD or the Convention) should herald a new epoch in the way persons with disabilities are treated throughout the world community. The entire panoply of ramifications of this Convention, the purpose of which is “to promote, protect and ensure the full enjoyment of all human rights and fundamental freedoms by all persons with disabilities, and to promote respect for their inherent dignity”, (Article 1) is as yet unascertainable. However, States Parties must “take all appropriate measures to eliminate discrimination by any person, organization or private enterprise” (Article 4(1) (e)), among other obligations. For the self-governing legal profession, the primary responsibility for ensuring compliance falls to its individual members, its law societies and its federations. This mission is critical in order to demonstrate that lawyers avoid discriminatory “customs and practices” (Article 4(1)(c)) and it is incumbent upon the profession as it continues to fulfil its essential role as an unwritten pillar of the Canadian constitution in upholding the rule of law. This article provides a small contribution to the extensive self-examination mandated by the Convention for the bar. It offers a brief overview of the CRPD in order to introduce its rich array of novel measures. The paper spotlights principles of professional ethics which are implicated by the Convention and identifies other areas of governance and policy wherein lawyers should consider its effects. The article then endeavours to articulate features of the moral dimension of legal professionalism which must be reconfigured in the wake of the Convention. The exhortations of the CRPD for lawyers seem daunting, but the prescribed reforms are both socially responsible and long overdue. The concentration herein will be on persons with long-term “mental” or “intellectual” impairments (Article 1), who experience discrimination and stigma most acutely, as exemplified by the readiness of society and the legal system to intrude upon their autonomy, remove their capacity for decision-making, permit forcible interventions and confine them to “live in conditions of poverty” (Preamble (t)). However, most of the following comments would apply to other persons with disabilities who have “physical” or “sensory impairments” (Article 1).
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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 | 0.009 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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".