Access to Justice Versus Freedom of Contract: A Comparative Analysis of Canada and us Enforcement of Mandatory Arbitration Agreements and Class Action Waivers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: Canadian and American courts and legislatures have adopted different approaches to the enforceability of mandatory arbitration clauses and class action waivers. Both jurisdictions face a fundamental question: whether the benefits of including these provisions in contracts of adhesion, such as commercial certainty and freedom of contract, should supersede the right to access the civil justice system on an individual or class-wide basis. This paper will comparatively analyze the law in Canada and the United States surrounding the enforceability of mandatory arbitration clauses and class action waivers. The Canadian approach is inconsistent, as each Canadian province has differing consumer protection legislation. As a result, the Supreme Court of Canada has struggled to establish national consensus. In contrast, the US Supreme Court has consistently upheld the validity and effectiveness of pre-dispute resolution clauses, even if a plaintiff’s costs of individually arbitrating exceed their potential recovery. Ultimately, the US Supreme Court maintains that freedom of contract and party autonomy supersede consumer protections and the right to commence civil proceedings.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.029 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.014 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".