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Record W4413105585 · doi:10.32920/29896178.v1

Legislating a Family Law Culture Shift

2025· preprint· en· W4413105585 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
Deanne Sowter

Bibliographic record

Venuenot available
Typepreprint
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicMulticultural Socio-Legal Studies
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsLawPolitical science

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

On March 1, 2021, the long-awaited amendments to the Divorce Act, RSC 1985 c3 (2nd Supp) came into effect, changing the word “custody” to the more accurate “decision-making”, expanding on the best interests of the child test, creating presumptions for relocation, and for the first time, recognizing family violence. In addition to these crucial substantive changes, there has been a bubbling excitement among the family law bar about the amendments’ emphasis on resolving family law matters through non-adversarial processes. (E.g.: here and here.) Except where there is family violence, and only where “appropriate”, counsel are required to “encourage” the client “to attempt to resolve the matters” through a “family dispute resolution process”, which includes collaborative practice (“CP”) for the first time (s.7.7(2)(a)). All lawyers are already required to recommend settlement to their clients (R.3.2-4), and court rules often require that parties try to settle before they proceed to trial; but the range of dispute resolution processes recognized has been expanded and the client has an obligation to “try” (s.7.3). In other words, the bar seems to have been set higher in terms of prioritizing the merits of a consensual resolution. The Supreme Court of Canada called for a “culture shift” in civil litigation in Hryniak v Mauldin, 2014 SCC 7, and the culture of family law has been shifting over the last fifty years. The sense is that these amendments are trying to encourage further change, recognizing the need for a culture of reasonableness in family law, and space for non-adversarial advocacy, but not at the expense of rights-based approaches and adversarialism where necessary.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.030
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.029
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Commentary · Consensus signal: Commentary
Teacher disagreement score0.291
Threshold uncertainty score0.578

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0300.029
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0020.001
Science and technology studies0.0280.033
Scholarly communication0.0140.010
Open science0.0030.015
Research integrity0.0110.019
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0100.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.050
GPT teacher head0.355
Teacher spread0.305 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreCommentary

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".

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Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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