Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This paper introduces an international readership to an innovative policy response to cohabitation. Under a law passed in 2024 by the Canadian province of Quebec, unmarried cohabitants who become parents of the same child will automatically enter a ‘parental union.’ The legislature intended parental union to protect children without marrying adults by force. This new relationship form entails some of marriage’s effects, although it does not change the spouses’ civil status. The paper draws out the design choices underlying this intriguing middle ground between Quebec’s robust marriage regime and its laissez-faire approach to cohabitation. Although the parental union calls for limited sharing and contemplates a remedy for unjust enrichment between the spouses, it has no measures founded in solidarity or redressing need. It does not apply to cohabitants whose common children were born before the end of June 2025. Nor does this reform do anything for the many cohabitants who are not legal parents to the same child. Readers will judge the extent to which this reform merits imitation for the balance it strikes between protection of the vulnerable, compensation for contributions, and autonomy.
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 | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.018 | 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".