Current trends in Canadian civil justice system reform : manufactured simplicity or equitable access?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The civil access to justice problem in Canada is recognized as a crisis, but even with widespread justice system stakeholder recognition and ongoing attempts at reform, progress is slow. This thesis undertakes a critical review of modern civil access to justice reforms and jurisprudential developments, using British Columbia as the site of inquiry, to identify limitations to the current approach. Then, by analyzing the current state of inequality in Canada, and using existing sociological research into processes of cumulative advantage and disadvantage in society, it argues that an expanded framework that will lead to more responsive access to justice reforms is one that takes into account the broader context of socioeconomic stratification and inequality in Canada and that asks how these have impacted the evolution of Canada’s civil justice system. This analysis also makes clear that achieving progress in civil access to justice requires a conception of access to justice that focuses on the concept of equitable access to justice, which is one that seeks to level the playing field by neutralizing disproportionate advantage or disadvantage in navigating the civil justice system either through structural system change or policy interventions such as robust legal aid funding to provide wider availability of legal representation. It then operationalizes this expanded framework by conducting an exploratory mixed methodology study, through quantitative statistical case outcome analysis and qualitative interviews of low income legal service providers, that looks at the relationship between: (1) British Columbia’s procedural and jurisdictional structure; (2) legal outcomes; and (3) legally advantaged and disadvantaged users. Lastly, it provides recommendations for future study and reforms that will advance the cause of equitable access to justice.
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 | 0.008 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 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, 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".