Exploring Judicial Appreciations of Parental Addiction in Child Custody and Access Decisions: Quebec as a Case Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper addresses how Quebec courts give effect to the “best interests of the child” principle when faced with custody or access claims advanced by substance-dependent parents. Part One contrasts the way that the medical community understands and evaluates addiction with the approach to this issue undertaken by Quebec’s family law courts. Juridical – specifically, judicial – perceptions of addiction are then explored through an analysis of Quebec family law cases that have considered this issue in the context of custody and access claims. Judicial analyses and discourse reveals an appreciation of substance dependency that differs considerably from the approach to this issue presented in the medical literature. Last, this paper questions whether legal outcomes might benefit by relying more fully on medical interpretations of addiction. It considers whether it is possible to recognize addiction’s physiological aspects in deciding custody and access claims, in particular, by acknowledging the necessity of rehabilitative treatment for this condition. Accordingly, it explores the relevance, and practical and moral implications, of treatment orders for parents coping with addiction who seek custody or contact with their children. This analysis ultimately concludes that such orders are feasible, yet would only be appropriate once a court has sufficient awareness of the accessibility of appropriate treatment resources in each case and for the particular parties concerned.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".