Mandatory legal representation for children in custody, access and child protection proceedings
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The principle 'best interests of the child' has been expanded by the legal community in recent years to apply to any matter involving children in family law proceedings. The weight ascribed to this principle, however, has been diluted. In custody, access and child protection cases, evidence of which custodial arrangements are in a child's interests are often presented by adult parties in prolonged and costly proceedings. The judge makes an order which is intended to meet the child's "best interests", in the child's absence. This paper first examines the historical and theoretical justifications for children's rights in Canadian and international law and the "best interests" principle. Second, the concept of "legal representation for children" is explored, with specific reference to inconsistencies in the jurisprudence concerning the role of independent representation for children. This paper argues that to truly reflect a custodial or access arrangement made in the child's "best interests", it is imperative that the child's voice be heard by the court through independent legal counsel assigned to represent that child's individual needs and concerns.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".