Access Barred: The Effects of the Cuts and Restructuring of Legal Aid in B.C. on Women Attempting to Navigate the Provincial Family Court System
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Self-represented litigants are becoming an epidemic in the B.C. provincial court system. Litigants who lack legal training and knowledge about the formalities of the court often slow and disrupt the justice system. The cuts to legal aid and the Supreme Court of Canada decision in Christie have contributed to this epidemic. The purpose of this paper is to discuss some of the challenges that self-represented litigants pose to the family law justice system. The erosions to legal aid funding and services have had a disproportionately negative effect on women. It has forced women to become self-represented litigants, resulting in women's continued impoverishment and financial dependency on men, exposed women to violence and abuse by ex-spouses, and forced women to surrender child support, spousal support, custody, and access rights. This paper addresses the current state of legal aid in B.C. It also discusses the adverse effects that the cuts and restructuring of legal aid in B.C. have had on women attempting to navigate the provincial family court system. The paper limits its discussions to the heterosexual experience for brevity and does not address child protection issues, as different legal rules apply in that context.
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 | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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".