Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: “Some Basis in Fact” and the Certification of Common Issues
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: In this paper, the authors review the state of the law regarding plaintiffs’ evidentiary burden at certification. Specifically, the authors canvass the jurisprudence on the “some basis in fact” standard that plaintiffs are required to satisfy in respect of the common issue criterion under class proceedings legislation. Originally pronounced by the Supreme Court of Canada in Hollick v Toronto (City), the “some basis in fact” test has become the source of considerable debate. Two dominant perspectives have emerged over time. According to the first, the “some basis in fact” standard is a one-stage analysis that requires examination of only the class-wide nature of the proposed issues. According to the second, the “some basis in fact” inquiry involves a two-step analysis requiring plaintiffs to furnish evidence in support of the (1) existence of the alleged common issues and (2) the proposition that the issues can be resolved on a class-wide basis. By tracing the evolution of the “some basis in fact” test and analyzing comparative case law, it appears that the law is now settled: the two-step test governs the assessment of common issues at certification.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".