Rethinking Volks V Robinson: The Implications of Applying a "Contextaulised Choice Model" to Prospective South African Domestic Partnerships Legislation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The article considers certain critical failings of the so-called "choice argument" (that is the view that, by opting to cohabit in a life partnership rather than marry or enter into a civil partnership, a life partner is not entitled to the legal benefits provided by matrimonial [property] law) as it was applied to opposite-sex life partnerships by the majority of the Constitutional Court in Volks v Robinson.1 On the basis of Canadian jurisprudence, a "contextualised choice model" is developed that distinguishes between need-based claims and those involving property disputes, and holds that the "choice argument" could at best be relevant regarding the latter category of claims, while the existence of a reciprocal duty of support is sine qua non for any need-based claim to succeed. These findings are applied to registered and unregistered domestic partnerships under the draft Domestic Partnerships Bill, 2008, with the aim of suggesting certain amendments to the Bill in the hope of ensuring amore consistent and principled legal position once the Bill is enacted.Keywords: Life partnership; domestic partnership; Domestic Partnerships Bill; choice argument; contextualised choice model; reciprocal duty of support.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".