Justice Done? An Analysis of One Aspect to the 2006 Irish High Court Ruling in Zappone and Giligan v. Revenue Commissioners and Attorney General
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, I conduct an analysis of extracts from the 2006 High Court ruling in the matter of Zappone and Gilligan v. Revenue Commissioners and Attorney General. This case centred on the issue of same-sex marriage in Ireland. While there were a number of important aspects to this ruling, I elaborate on one issue, i.e. child development in the context of the parenting that is done by lesbians and gay men. I focus on some of the research studies that informed expert witness testimony on behalf of the plaintiffs and the State in this case. Firstly, I provide an analysis of some of the research findings in an American study, which denoted a review of a number of child development research studies that were conducted in the 1980s and 1990s. In that regard, I problematise the routine reproduction of heteronormativity. With regard to the State's case, I discuss the interpretation of a research study that was conducted in the 1980s by a team of researchers in the United States. I also highlight aspects of an affidavit that was initially sworn into evidence in a same-sex marriage case in Canada. I discern errors in some of this expert testimony that was enunciated and interpreted with a view to furthering the Irish State's case. Neither the routine reproduction of heteronormativity, nor the repeated articulation of erroneous testimony garnered attention in the High Court. I argue that these dynamics denote problematic aspects to the ruling in Zappone and Gilligan v. Revenue Commissioners and Attorney General.
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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 | 0.011 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.015 |
| 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".