Domestic Contracts and Family Law Exceptionalism: An Historical Perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since at least the late 1980s, the enforceability of domestic contracts in Canadian common law has tended to be analyzed in terms of a formal equality/substantive fairness dichotomy. This paper suggests that our understanding of the common law of domestic contracts in Canada can be enriched by adding an historical lens to existing analyses. Specifically, the paper argues that the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in the Pelech v. Pelech trilogy was not only an attempt to inject the ideology of contract into family law, but also amounted to a continuation of long-standing approaches to separation agreements in English and Canadian law—an approach that rendered the treatment of separation agreements and the result in Pelech historical outliers when considered against broader exceptionalizing trends in judicial and scholarly approaches to agreements touching upon the family. From this perspective, the retreat from Pelech in the subsequent Supreme Court of Canada cases of Miglin v. Miglin, Hartshorne v. Hartshorne, and Rick v. Brandsema was, therefore, also a move away from the historically distinctive approach to separation agreements, and the continuation of much older processes of exceptionalism within family law.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".