Access to Justice, Judicial Economy, and Behaviour Modification: Exploring the Goals of Canadian Class Actions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The author examines the three goals of class actions in Canada: access to justice, judicial economy, and behaviour modification, with a focus on the preferability inquiry at certification. A comprehensive analysis of the goals is undertaken through an examination of the various law commission reports, critical commentary, and case law from the Supreme Court of Canada and lower courts in every Canadian jurisdiction with class proceedings legislation. While courts and commentators have focused on the economic aspects of access to justice in certification applications, the author advances the position that the definition and use of access to justice needs to be broadened, mainly by considering non-economic factors. The certification stage is vital to access to justice as it can transform claims that are otherwise non-viable (because the cost of litigation exceeds any potential benefits) into aggregate viable claims. Through this transformation, certification breathes new life into substantive rights, something that the author asks the courts to consider when they engage with whether or not to certify a class.
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 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 | 0.007 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.035 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| 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".