They are Agreements Nonetheless, Case Comment on Miglin v. Miglin, 2003 SCC 24
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In April 2003 the Supreme Court of Canada released its much-anticipated decision in Miglin v. Miglin, a case in which a divorced wife sought spousal support under the Divorce Act several years after signing a separation agreement in which she had released all claims to such. In Miglin the Supreme Court of Canada was finally faced with the issue of how to resolve the on-going controversy about the weight to be given to spousal support agreements. The majority reasons speak in two voices: one emphasizing fairness concerns and the unique context in which spousal support agreements are negotiated, the other emphasizing values of certainty, finality, and autonomy. In the end, the latter voice speaks louder and conveys the dominant message of the judgment. The judgment is all in all a disappointing one. Although both counsel, experienced family lawyers, offered relatively straight-forward tests, the Supreme Court of Canada chose to set out on its own, crafting a contextual balancing test which is complex and fact-driven. At best Miglin will introduce several years of confusion and uncertainty into the law as courts and lawyers struggle to give concrete meaning to each of the various steps of the new test. While Miglin is most obviously a contracts case, the decision also has an important subtext about spousal support. Rather than assuming responsibility for providing more guidance as to appropriate spousal support outcomes, the Court has chosen to evade the difficult issues in this area of law by relying on contracts to provide the answers. It is possible that Miglin will result in a decline in the use of releases and time limits in spousal support agreements as lawyers realize that these will now be difficult to override.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.019 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.002 |
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".