Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: The prevailing approach to the workable methodology standard — a threshold requirement whereby putative representative plaintiffs must demonstrate there is a “workable methodology” for assessing general causation at certification — does not provide clear, consistent guidance on the meaning or application of “workability,” or the evidence representative plaintiffs must adduce to overcome this requirement. As a result, Canadian courts have diverged on the question of whether one must demonstrate an existing, empirically tested methodology to satisfy this evidential standard, or whether one need only demonstrate a credible, plausible methodology, which — though not tested yet — could allow for the issue of general causation to be determined on a class-wide basis. The current state of the law is particularly concerning in the context of class proceedings alleging novel mechanisms of harm (like toxic torts), which are increasingly important legal mechanisms to hold tortfeasors accountable in today’s world of mass production, technological advances, and the megacorporation. The workable methodology standard has far-reaching implications, as a court’s insistence on a tested methodology (if that is indeed the standard) creates a scenario of quasi-legal-immunity for defendants who expose individuals to unstudied or prohibited chemicals and thus presently unstudied risks of injury. This paper begins by tracing the forked paths of the workable methodology standard in Canadian jurisprudence before offering a critique of insistence on empirical proof of causation, especially at certification. It concludes by suggesting a principled path forward for defining “workable methodology” in an equitable, predictable manner that is consistent with the objectives of class proceedings, the evidentiary standard at certification, and the most basic tenets of tort law.
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 | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 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".