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Record W4414249195 · doi:10.1017/s0021855325100703

How Far Are Kenya’s Courts? Distance as a Barrier to Justice in Kenya

2025· article· en· W4414249195 on OpenAlexaff
Lance Hadley, Edith Aoko

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of African Law · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicLegal Education and Practice Innovations
Canadian institutionsCarleton University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsEconomic JusticePopulationDistribution (mathematics)Rural areaInformation and Communications TechnologyRural population

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract Access to justice for many Kenyans remains a challenge due to the infrastructural and geographic reach of court services throughout the country. This recent development paper presents a spatial proximity analysis that quantifies the distribution of Kenya’s population proximate to the nearest court as an illustrative indicator of access to justice. The results estimate that about 3.5 per cent (1.7 million) of Kenya’s population reside more than 100 kilometres to the nearest physical courthouse, with the average distance to the nearest court per person being 22 kilometres. These considerable travel distances create significant barriers to justice, especially for rural populations, which are further aggravated by limited access to information and low levels of legal literacy. The paper concludes by discussing the current approaches, such as leveraging information and communication technologies, to expand access to court services, improve case information availability and ultimately enhance last-mile justice delivery for Kenyans living in remote regions.

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 machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.004
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.117
Threshold uncertainty score0.232

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.004
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.002
Science and technology studies0.0040.002
Scholarly communication0.0030.002
Open science0.0000.002
Research integrity0.0010.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0080.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.023
GPT teacher head0.357
Teacher spread0.334 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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