Getting the Ghet: Analyzing the Need for State Intervention in Canadian Jewish Divorces
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A commitment to religious freedom involves respecting the individual’s spiritual choices and obligations. However, to regard a religious community as an association that members join and quit at will is to miss both the value of religious association and its potential to limit, and sometimes even to oppress, its members (Moon, 2008). Through analysis of the judicial reasoning in several Canadian Supreme Court cases, I argue in this article that the courts are justified in ruling to protect vulnerable group members from oppressive or unjust religious rules, and that the state is justified in legislating such protections. In the private sphere, most religious systems impose patriarchal norms on family life (Becker, 1999). In Judaism, the Jewish Orthodox rabbinical courts have exclusive control over marriage and divorce. These courts almost always grant to men full control over divorce, which results in gender-based discrimination and violation of female human rights. Under Jewish law, Halacha, divorce is not a judicial act and may be achieved only at the husband’s will. When the man refuses to divorce, the wife has no religious recourse and is known as agunah, or "chained wife." She is unable to continue her life without a ghet, the religious annulment of the marriage, and civil divorce or subsequent marriage are not viable options according to Jewish traditions. Practices surrounding the ghet often ignore the woman’s rights, rights that should be protected by the state and upheld by its courts. In this context, the role of the state is to alleviate women’s disadvantages; as such, secular legal authorities, comprising actors in both the legislative and judicial systems, should be obligated to ensure equal and fair treatment for women, even in the sphere of religious tradition.
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 | 0.004 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".