Class Actions and the “Mixed Law” Regimes that Have Embraced them: A Comparative Reflection on Class Actions in the South African and Quebec Legal Systems
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: Over the course of the last few decades, class actions have gone from being an essentially American phenomenon to one that is truly international. Class actions have also transcended the common law world and have been adopted by civilian jurisdictions and by “mixed law” jurisdictions such as Quebec and South Africa. In the following article, the authors examine how this unique form of complex litigation has been developed by the courts of South Africa and applied in the context of a recent silicosis case brought against the gold mining industry. The authors proceed to analyze the case — and the issues to which it gives rise — from the standpoint of Quebec law and civil procedure. This analysis shows that while important distinctions exist between Quebec and South Africa, the two mixed law jurisdictions are also quite similar when it comes to class actions and have much to learn from one another.
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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 | 0.009 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.029 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
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".