Introducing the Next Class of Bastard: An Assessment of the Definitional Implications of the Succession Law Reform Act for After-Born Children
Bibliographic record
Abstract
After-born children are anachronistic aberrations. Defying any commonsense notion of procreation, an after-born child is conceived after the death of its parent. While a remarkable feat for reproductive medical science, posthumously conceived children push the boundaries of existing laws, creating problems previous generations of lawmakers did not need to consider. This article examines the challenges posed by after-born children in the area of intestate succession law. More specifically, using the province of Ontario as a case study, this article argues that the definitions of "child" and "issue" in the Succession Law Reform Act ["SLRA"] subject after-born children to inheritance-related deprivations on the basis of birth status alone. Creating a new class of bastard, this article argues that discriminating against a group of children for no reason above and beyond the way in which they came into this world is reminiscent of Canada's treatment of children born out of wedlock in the previous century. In order to contextualize the discrimination potentially faced by the after-born, this article begins by examining the legal deprivations resulting from legislation passed in Ontario condemning children born out of wedlock to illegitimate status in the past. No court in Ontario—or Canada at large—has yet had the opportunity to consider the inheritance rights of after-born children. Consequently, the article follows with a comparative analysis of the statutes and case law on point in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia; it does so in order to evaluate the various interests at stake should Ontario choose to reform the SLRA.
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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 | 0.015 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
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".