Privatizing Diversity: A Cautionary Tale from Religious Arbitration in Family Law
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Demands to accommodate religious diversity in the public sphere have recently intensified. The debates surrounding the Islamic headscarf (hijab) in Europe vividly illustrate this trend. We also find a new challenge on the horizon: namely, the request to "privatize diversity" through alternative dispute resolution processes that permit parties to move their disputes from public courthouses into the domain of religious or customary sources of law and authority. The recent controversies in Canada and England related to the so-called Shari’a tribunals demonstrate the potential force of the storm to come. In this Article, I offer an alternative to the presently popular vision of private diversity. This alternative is based on a deep commitment to women’s identity and membership interests as well as their dignity and equality. Women’s legal dilemmas often arise (at least in the family arena) from their allegiance to various overlapping systems of identification, authority and belief: in this case, those arising from religious and secular law. I argue that only recognition of women’s multiple affiliations, and the subtle interactions among them, can help resolve these dilemmas. The recognition of multiple legal affiliations does not sit well with the traditional view that a clear line can be drawn between public and private, official and unofficial, secular and religious, or positive law and traditional practice. Instead, to recognize multiple affiliations is to require greater access to, and coordination among, these once competing sources of law and identity. Once we conceive of citizenship more richly, it becomes apparent that individuals and families should not be forced to choose between the rights of citizenship and group membership: instead, they should be afforded the opportunity to express their commitment to both. I offer a vision of how such an alternative might be realized.
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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 | 0.018 | 0.027 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.060 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.024 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.017 | 0.020 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".