TURNING THE SPOTLIGHT ON CLASS REPRESENTATIVES -EMPIRICAL INSIGHTS FROM DOWN UNDER
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ten months before Ontario became the first Canadian common law province to authorise American-style class actions, class actions became available in the Federal Court of Australia. In these two countries and in the United States, the named plaintiffs, commonly referred to as class representatives, are the only claimants formally in charge of the litigation, on the plaintiff side, whilst the outcome of class actions binds not only them and their opponents but also the claimants that they represent, the absent class members. And yet, to date, there have been no comprehensive studies of class representatives in these three countries. The aim of this article is to partly address this significant lacuna in the international legal literature by providing the findings of an empirical study, that the authors have undertaken, of the persons that acted as class representatives in the class actions that were filed in the first 17 years of the operation of the class action procedure in the Federal Court of Australia. It is hoped that this article will prompt Canadian scholars to undertake similar studies with respect to Canadian class representatives.\n\n\nDix mois avant que l’Ontario devienne la première province de common law canadienne à autoriser les recours collectifs à l’américaine, la Cour fédérale d’Australie autorisait ceux-ci. Dans ces deux pays, ainsi qu’aux États-Unis, les demandeurs nommés, communément appelés représentants, sont les seuls demandeurs formellement mêlés au litige du côté de la partie demanderesse, tandis que l’issue des recours collectifs lie non seulement les représentants et leurs adversaires, mais aussi les demandeurs qu’ils représentent, c’est-à-dire les personnes inscrites au recours collectif qui sont absentes. Pourtant, il n’y a eu à ce jour aucune étude approfondie sur ces représentants de groupes dans ces trois pays. L’objet du présent article est de combler en partie cette importante lacune dans la littérature juridique internationale en fournissant les conclusions d’une étude empirique effectuée par les auteurs et portant sur les représentants dans le cadre des recours collectifs introduits dans les 17 premières années du régime des recours collectifs devant la Cour fédérale d’Australie. Il est à espérer que le présent article incitera les chercheurs canadiens à entreprendre de telles études en ce qui concerne les représentants de groupes canadiens.
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 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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 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 teacher head, 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".