Children's Rights, Paternal Power and Fiduciary Duty: From Roman law to the Supreme Court of Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Parental rights originate in patria potestas, the proprietary power of the Roman father, and its incidents of custody, control and corporal punishment. Parental rights as proprietary rights, as rights over another, cannot co-exist with children's rights. What, then, are parental rights in the age of children's rights? This Essay surveys the influence of Roman doctrine on modern law in and through the Supreme Court of Canada. The court acknowledges children's rights, views proprietary rights over children as a thing of the past and recognizes custody as the child's right, not the parent's. Yet the court vitiated the fiduciary standard for parents, limited state parens patriae jurisdiction and upheld two of the three incidents of patria potestas. By making childhood an excuse for avoiding principled rights analysis, conflating adult interests with children's rights and confusing assault with touch, the court upheld the proprietary rights of corporal punishment and control. If parental rights are understood as rights correlative to parental fiduciary duty, and if rights are seen as markers of relationship rather than its antithesis, then the law is rid of archaic notions of parental rights. The way is open to substantive judicial and social engagement with the rights of the child.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.035 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| 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".