Autumn links
This newsletter is a links-only issue including Charter developments, judicial accountability and online justice and procedural fairness for the self-presented. And a bonus peek into Plato’s Cave.
It was a busy week, with two shows broadcast and two interviews for a later show done - so this newsletter will be short and links only. Next week’s newsletter will include case comments as well as links.
Links of interest
Lessons in the Practicalities of Procedural Fairness For SRLs
While there may be growing consensus about the fact that self-represented litigants (SRLs) are often unsure of court procedures and processes, a recent decision from the Yukon Court of Appeal highlights the significant implications for SRLs who are struggling, and the responsibility on other justice system players to make the process as transparent as possible.
The application of the Charter to universities
Taken together, the focus in the majority reasons in York Teachers and Dickson on delegated authority and public functions (including the elaboration of binding norms) is likely to animate arguments for Charter application in university settings. For the most part, Canadian universities exercise delegated authority under statute, make binding rules, take highly consequential decisions and perform public functions in educating students and distributing government money. These considerations chime with those relied upon in York Teachers and Dickson. Even the minority reasons in Dickson, with the emphasis on protecting individual rights and not creating Charter-free zones, point in the direction of extending the application of s. 32 to universities.
Judicial accountability and online dispute resolution: a British view
The above projection is meant to facilitate a bird’s-eye view of the possible trajectory of judicial accountability resulting from the further development of fully digital dispute resolution pathways. While appreciating and supporting efforts to create more efficient and accessible justice through ‘integrated and intuitive digital dispute resolution environment’, it is worth considering the reform’s impact on judicial accountability. The digitalisation of justice and the consequent datafication of judicial accountability seems to be a shift of potentially far greater magnitude than the previous major grounds for the historical development of judicial accountability (e.g., increase in the substantive decision-making powers of the judiciary, the spread of New Public Management approaches to justice systems). With an understanding of how digital justice operates today and how it might look like in the near future, we need to focus on how to ensure robust judicial accountability in the Digital Justice System of Tomorrow.
On typos and the benefits of a proofreader
According to Microsoft, their users punch backspace more than almost any other key on the keyboard. As a Mac user, for me it’s delete, delete, delete. All day long. But stuff still gets through. Why? Our brains are efficient. We don’t brute-force process everything we read. We utilize prediction to save energy and speed up our work; our brains take in just part of what the eyes scan and fill in the gaps.
But there are tradeoffs for this efficiency. I, for instance, expected to see counterterrorism in Novak’s draft; so, when my eyes spied countertearooms, my brain supplied the right word, though the wrong one actually stared back from the screen.
This problem is all the more bedeviling when it comes to our own words. The power of prediction amplifies. As Nick Stockton writes for Wired,
When we’re proof reading our own work, we know the meaning we want to convey. Because we expect that meaning to be there, it’s easier for us to miss when parts (or all) of it are absent. The reason we don’t see our own typos is because what we see on the screen is competing with the version that exists in our heads.
It turns out familiarity breeds gaffes as much as contempt, probably more so. Stockton continues,
This explains why your readers are more likely to pick up on your errors. Even if you are using words and concepts that they are also familiar with, their brains are on this journey for the first time, so they are paying more attention to the details along the way and not anticipating the final destination.
Plato’s cave and ignorance
…in general, human beings tend to prefer cognitive comfort, the reinforcement of the familiar, to an encounter with the unknown. Learning may disrupt our cognitive comfort; it displaces us. Education requires us to revise or abandon our routines, recipes, and rituals — life as we know it — and to do so we must overcome a kind of natural cognitive inertia. A place of ignorance can be a sturdy nest of cognitive comfort for those who dwell within.