Life Everlasting? The Absurdity of Perpetual Privilege
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article looks at solicitor-client privilege and the lawyers’ duty of confidentiality from the perspective of the harm done to legal history and Canada’s documentary heritage by the claim that privilege never ends. After discussing the emergence of the field of legal history, the scarcity of lawyers’ papers preserved in archives, and efforts to address the perpetual privilege problem, the author examines the rationales for privilege and the justifications for its purportedly absolute and unending nature and finds them wanting. The article then sets out the role of archival institutions in preserving historically valuable records and making them available for research. The author argues that, after a reasonable interval, the public interest in access to lawyers’ papers trumps privilege and that archivists have the tools and experience to manage (temporary) access restrictions to such materials. The recent guidelines on disclosure of historical records under the Access to Information Act signal that privilege need not be perpetual and indicate the need to start a conversation to finally resolve the conflict between privilege and fuller documentation of both the legal profession and its impact on society.
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 | 0.015 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.113 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.023 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.016 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".