A new paradigm for protecting autonomi and the right to legal capacity. Advancing Substantive Equality for Persons with Disabilities through Law, Policy and Practice. Law Commission of Ontario
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper, the authors assert that the principles set out in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities require a paradigm shift in the law of capacity so that the question is no longer: Does a person have the mental capacity to exercise legal capacity? The question is instead: What types of supports are required for the person to exercise his or her legal capacity?\n\nThe authors advocate for a conception of legal capacity that includes as a minimum the capacity to express one’s intention or will in ways that at least one other person can reasonably describe as meaningful. Based on this minimum threshold, the authors argue for a reformulation of the concept of legal capacity based on three decision-making statuses: (1) legally independent status – where there is reasonable evidence that the person has the ability, by him or herself or with assistance, to understand information that is relevant to making a decision and to appreciate the reasonably foreseeable consequences of a decision; (2) supported decision-making status – where a person needs support from others to express or represent him or herself to third parties, and/or to process information; and (3) facilitated decision-making status – where a person has significant disabilities, is not able to act legally independently, does not have a trusting and committed relationship based on shared life experiences and personal knowledge, and for whom not even a co-decision-maker could discern his or her will or intention without deeper knowledge of the person and his/her ways of communicating. This last status is conceptualized as temporary until an appointed facilitator can learn how to understand the person’s intention or will through his or her unique way of communicating.\n\nThe authors advocate for a positive duty on the state and on third parties to provide supports and accommodations to facilitate decision-making. Specifically, they propose that the right to access supports includes a right to access the types of supports and combinations of supports that most enhances each person’s autonomy based not on disability status but on the particular individual making the decision and the nature of the decision itself. The authors set out detailed mechanisms for safeguards, monitoring, information provision, enforcement and independent advocacy to ensure that the autonomy of persons in various decision-making statuses is maximized and such persons are safe from serious adverse effects, including abuse and neglect. The effect of the paradigm shift that the authors propose is to widen the concept of legal capacity so that more persons with intellectual, cognitive and psychosocial disabilities would be found legally capable and thus their autonomy would be respected.
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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 | 0.011 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.066 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.027 | 0.022 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.002 |
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".