Security of Tenure in Foreclosure Proceedings: The Judicial Role when Borrowers are Absent or Self-Represented
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The right to adequate housing requires that individuals not be evicted from their homes without being provided appropriate legal or other protections. In Canada, the federal government has promoted housing through mortgage-financed homeownership. Individuals risk losing their homes if they default on their mortgage. When an individual can no longer afford their mortgage payments, the law must reconcile the individual’s right not to be evicted without appropriate legal protections with a lender’s right to be paid. In a mortgage law system that prioritizes the economic interests of a lender, this is no easy task. This balance becomes especially difficult in court-based foreclosure proceedings because lenders are typically present and represented, and borrowers are frequently absent or self-represented. Through observing 105 residential foreclosure proceedings at the Edmonton Law Courts, this article explores the role of courts in preserving the integrity of the adversarial system and thereby promoting security of tenure. It examines how judges can adjust their role in the adversarial model to better protect self-represented and absent borrowers. It identifies nine strategies used by judges: scrutinizing the lender’s evidence, seeking additional information from the parties, scrutinizing the relief sought, raising new legal issues, enforcing consistency across cases, providing advice to borrowers, offering referrals to borrowers, encouraging negotiations, and assuming a problem-solving role. This article reveals that judges often assume an active role in an attempt to rectify the power imbalance in foreclosure proceedings. Furthermore, the mere presence of the borrower improves the judge’s ability to account for their interests in the proceedings and thereby safeguard their security of tenure.
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 | 0.016 | 0.045 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".