Bibliographic record
Abstract
Family law is succumbing to pluralism. Scholars have celebrated this trend as a desirable outcome of the struggle for marriage equality. And a pluralistic family law seems to offer distinct benefits: more regimes than just marriage, and greater room for choice within each regime (manifest by more types of legally enforceable intrafamilial contracts). This Article exposes counterintuitive facts that lead to a surprising conclusion: the legal changes that scholars tout as increasing pluralism eviscerate the substance of the choices families are permitted to make. The policies that appear to extend choice within each regime, in fact, mask what I call a “neoclassical” approach to intrafamilial contracts — that is, an approach that adopts formalist, binary, and proceduralist principles for the creation of legal obligations. As this Article’s scrutiny of prenuptial and cohabitation agreements reveals, neoclassical contract theory is slowly taking over family law. The neoclassical approach vindicates a thin notion of autonomy over other values and favors the status quo. The Article further contends that the roots of family law pluralism in market logic render it fundamentally flawed: as long as the menu of relationship options is predicated on basic contract law, then, regardless of how many options the menu includes, the system will necessarily privilege the more powerful partner. Is it possible to avoid this perverse result while preserving freedom of choice? The Article develops a more robust vision of pluralism by identifying the goals and methods of pluralism in family law as they have developed over time. In doing so, the Article offers foundations of a new theory of pluralism that advances true substantive equality and autonomy.
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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 | 0.013 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.057 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| 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".