One Parent, Three Parents: Judges and Ontario’s All Families Are Equal Act, 2016
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article studies judges’ early treatment of a new law on parentage and assisted reproduction. During decades of legislative inaction, Ontario’s judges adapted the law to evolving familial practices, at times boldly. A legislative overhaul in 2016, aiming to recognize all children’s families equally and inclusively, raised the question whether judges would adopt a more restrained role post-reform. In two early cases, where the new conditions for automatic recognition of a parental arrangement were unmet, the judges emphasized the intention of involved adults. Closely reading the legislation, the article presents bases for deciding the cases otherwise and for reducing their potential to incentivize litigation. Where the legislature has set out a broad range of accessible paths to parentage, even judges who champion family diversity may have reasons to stick to those paths. For legislative drafters, the difficulty of anticipating the variety of contemporary forms of family may counsel against purporting to limit judicial discretion. Ontario’s experience also favours including transitional measures in major reform.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.031 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".