Bibliographic record
Abstract
The law regulates some of society’s most significant relationships through status. Yet social and legal changes can diminish a status’s effectiveness and importance. The debates surrounding worker classification and nonmarital relationship recognition provide two pressing examples. By some estimates, over one quarter of all U.S. workers are part of the gig economy. If these gig workers are classified as employees, many rights will flow to them by virtue of that status; if they are instead classified as independent contractors, they get almost none of them. This binary approach exists in the family law context as well. Over 35 million adults are in committed nonmarital relationships marked by some combination of physical or emotional intimacy, property sharing, cohabitation, and shared childrearing. But the law will treat the overwhelming majority of them as single, meaning that unlike spouses, they will find themselves without legal protections and subsidies throughout the relationship and at its end. The problem in both contexts is a mismatch between established statuses and emerging social realities. This Article investigates the persistence of status-based regulation through the lenses of employment and marriage. In doing so, it makes four contributions. First, it identifies the relevant features of status and the tradeoffs inherent in regulating through status. Second, using the examples of gig workers and nonmarital partners, it shows how the features of status lead to the emergence of regulatory voids. Third, it argues that status-based regulation is inevitable, both because of practical political considerations and because the most obvious alternative to status-based regulation, contract, is necessarily shaped by the relational context and therefore devolves to status. Fourth, with reform as the only possibility, the Article proposes institutional design questions to guide future reform efforts.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.009 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.038 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.003 |
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".