Toward Justice Epidemiology: Outlining an Approach for Person-Centred Access to Justice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought widespread public attention to the fields of epidemiology and public health. These fields share a common commitment to the systematic study of disease across populations, with goals of better understanding, preventing, and treating adverse health events. They are empirical, evidence-based, and person-centred. This paper draws on the histories, norms, and methodologies of public health and epidemiology to construct a novel field of study: justice epidemiology. In recent years, a growing body of unmet legal needs research in Canada and elsewhere has demonstrated that justiciable events are likely ubiquitous, but also that these events tend to cluster for some, and that resources to effectively deal with legal problems are unevenly distributed. And while access to justice has been described as the most significant problem facing Canada’s legal system, there has been surprisingly little work done to outline a systematic path forward. Despite projects and initiatives to improve access to justice, we lack a map of what we need to know and how we could begin to understand access to justice problems and solutions. Specifically, there are knowledge gaps regarding the effects of access to justice problems on people’s lives over the long term and on whether interventions to improve access to justice are effective in doing so. Building on some nascent work connecting the fields of justice research and public health, this paper argues for the creation of a person-centred, empirical, interdisciplinary field of study that can help guide efforts to understand, prevent, and respond effectively to justice problems over the next 50 years and beyond.\nLa pandémie de COVID-19 a attiré l’attention du public sur les domaines de l’épidémiologie et de la santé publique. Ces domaines partagent un engagement commun en faveur de l’étude systématique des maladies au sein des populations, dans le but de mieux comprendre, prévenir et traiter les événements sanitaires indésirables. Ils sont empiriques, fondés sur des données probantes et centrés sur la personne. Cet article s’appuie sur l’histoire, les normes et les méthodologies de la santé publique et de l’épidémiologie pour construire un nouveau champ d’étude : l’épidémiologie de la justice. Ces dernières années, un nombre croissant de recherches sur les besoins juridiques non satisfaits au Canada et ailleurs ont démontré que les événements justiciables sont probablement omniprésents, mais aussi que ces événements ont tendance à se regrouper pour certains, et que les ressources permettant de traiter efficacement les problèmes juridiques sont inégalement réparties. Alors que l’accès à la justice a été décrit comme le problème le plus important auquel est confronté le système juridique canadien, il est surprenant de constater que peu de travaux ont été réalisés pour tracer une voie systématique vers l’avenir. Malgré les projets et les initiatives visant à améliorer l’accès à la justice, nous ne disposons pas d’une carte de ce que nous devons savoir et de la manière dont nous pourrions commencer à comprendre les problèmes et les solutions en matière d’accès à la justice. Plus précisément, nous manquons de connaissances sur les effets des problèmes d’accès à la justice sur la vie des gens à long terme et sur l’efficacité des interventions visant à améliorer l’accès à la justice. S’appuyant sur des travaux naissants reliant les domaines de la recherche sur la justice et de la santé publique, cet article plaide en faveur de la création d’un champ d’étude interdisciplinaire, empirique et centré sur la personne, qui puisse contribuer à orienter les efforts visant à comprendre, prévenir et répondre efficacement aux problèmes de justice au cours des cinquante prochaines années et au-delà.
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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 | 0.198 | 0.164 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.024 | 0.012 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.108 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.041 | 0.052 |
| Open science | 0.014 | 0.050 |
| Research integrity | 0.019 | 0.037 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".