How do theories of access to justice, judicial economy, and behaviour modification explain developments in the class actions debate from 1970 onward in England and Canada?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis investigates the rapidly developing area of collective redress in England and Canada. It looks at three procedures: class actions, group litigation, and representative actions. I make three normative arguments: 1. Class actions represent a departure from the principle of ‘accurate justice’ that has traditionally underpinned civil justice systems, although this departure is not unique and is characteristic of wider civil justice reforms; 2. Class actions and group litigation are not ‘one size fits all’ procedures, but instead serve a variety of purposes; and 3. Representative actions are distinct from both procedures and should not be used to aggregate individual claims at all – they should instead be used for the litigation of group rights. My thesis combines qualitative surveys, doctrinal analysis, and historical research into collective redress reforms in England and Canada. England has borrowed heavily from Canadian class actions in creating its own framework in competition law; England’s group litigation regime is much more established and Canada has much to learn from it. The representative rule also originated in England, although Canada’s interpretation was much broader and led to the development of class actions. There are indications that the same might be happening in England, but I argue that such an interpretation is incorrect. Collective redress in England and Canada is at a crossroads. In England, the UK Supreme Court has just ruled on the nascent competition law class actions regime, and is considering the scope of representative actions. In Canada, significant amendments have been made to Ontario’s Class Proceedings Act, and other Canadian jurisdictions are watching to see how these will be interpreted. Both countries can learn a great deal from each other. This thesis brings important empirical, historical, and normative insights into the current debates about collective redress on both sides of the Atlantic.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.040 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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".