The reception and use of social policy information in the High Court of Australia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Social policy information is information that may assist a judge in determining the social or economic consequences of a law. Social policy information is used by judges in developing the law. There are three jurisprudential models that, arguably, could be used to describe the reception and use of social policy information by the High Court of Australia. Under the appropriate model for describing the current law - the Legal Sources Model - social policy information is not treated as a fact in issue, and is not subject to the common law rules of evidence or to section 144 of the Evidence Act 1995 (Cth). Under the Legal Sources Model, the reception and use of social policy information is characterised as an integral part of the judicial reasoning process in determining the content of the law and remains within the sole discretion of the judge, subject to various restrictions. These restrictions arise out of the requirements of judicial process (the parties must be given an opportunity to comment on contentious social policy information) and constitutional limitations (court processes must not resemble Parliamentary Inquiries). Case studies demonstrate that social policy information is often widely used without any acknowledgement of the legal basis on which it is used, without the source of information being identified in the written judgment, and without any apparent method for evaluating the reliability of the information. The current system for the reception and use of social policy information fails to satisfy Best Practice Standards in several important respects, including the following. First, there is no legal rule that defines the circumstances in which judges should obtain, through inquiry, social policy information they reasonably need. Secondly, there is no legal rule that facilitates an evaluation of social policy information by judges. Thirdly, the source of social policy information is not always mentioned in judgments. Fourthly, the law regarding the reception and use of social policy information is not certain. Experience in relevant overseas jurisdictions - the United States, Canada and New Zealand - suggests that these problems are not unique to Australia. Various reform proposals are suggested. These are designed to overcome the deficiencies in the current system and to take advantage of useful ideas for reform which have been proposed overseas. The key proposal is that the High Court should develop a protocol to assist judges in using social policy information.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Direct model labels (unvalidated)
Per-model category and study-design labels from the labeling rounds. They are machine output, unvalidated, and the disagreement between models ships as data. No study design here is MEDLINE-validated yet.
| Model arm | Categories | Study design | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| gemma | no category Domain: not available · Genre: Other About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Observational | low |
| gpt | no category Domain: not available · Genre: Other About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Qualitative | low |
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 | 0.029 | 0.098 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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, unvalidatedLabeled directly by 2 models reading the full record.
The models disagree on parts of this classification; every voice is preserved in the section at the end of the page.
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".