Standing in the Way: Comparing Constraints on Access to Justice after the Liberalization of Public Interest Standing in Canada and Israel
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Canada (Attorney General) v. Downtown Eastside Sex Workers United Against Violence Society, the Supreme Court of Canada revised its traditional and restrictive doctrine of standing. By invoking a comparative analysis with the Supreme Court of Israel, this paper nourishes its argument with the experiences of another highly respected supreme court in a liberal democracy descendant from the common law tradition, with which the author is well acquainted. The Supreme Court of Israel's capacity to act both as an appellate court as well as a court of first instance better achieves the avowed goal of enhancing human rights and access to justice through a liberalization of the doctrine of standing. By contrast, in the Canadian legal context this doctrine operates in a juridical environment where the Supreme Court of Canada faces greater jurisdictional constraints on its ability to hear cases. These inherent limitations on access to justice block the achievement of the stated goals of the liberalization. This paper recognizes inherent obstacles as the main hindrance to realizing those goals, and suggests that in order to meet them the court must consider other policy solutions and administrative mechanisms, such as deploying new schemes to cover costs; revising administrative discretionary power to revisit questions of evidence; extra-judicial pronouncements on issues of law; enhancing or revising the court's relationship with the legislature to address inadequacies of the legal system; hearing more cases; shortening judgements; and processing litigation more efficiently. In other words, expanding standing alone will be insufficient for the purposes of improving access to justice.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.025 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".