Rethinking the Grounds for Divorce: Comparative Perspectives from the UK, the US, Canada and Australia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This Special Issue assesses and contextualises the change in English divorce procedures 1 in April 2022, following the implementation of the Divorce, Dissolution and Separation Act 2020.It does so by drawing comparisons with three closely related jurisdictionsthe US, Canada and Australiaall of which had revisited the requirements for marital fault or extended separation several decades prior to the English reform being enacted.This collection of articles arises from the proceedings of an international conference entitled 'Rethinking the Grounds for Divorce: Comparative Perspectives from the UK, the US, Canada and Australia', held in May 2023 at City, University of London with the support of the Society of Legal Scholars.2 Originally scheduled for 2020, the conference was sparked by the UK Government's public consultation on divorce in 2018, after the Supreme Court famously ruled in Owens v Owens that a woman in her mid-60's had to stay legally married for five years if her estranged husband opposed the divorce and his conduct did not meet the threshold for granting the divorce against his wishes.3 The outdated attachment to fault and lengthy separation placed English divorce law at odds with US, Canadian and Australian procedures.The comparative law event sought to explore lessons from more permissive jurisdictions at a time when England contemplated reform, focusing on the benefits and risks of the regime proposed under the Divorce, Dissolution and Separation Bill.Reconvened after a lengthy postponement due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the conference addressed a markedly different legal landscape: the reform bill had become law, and the amendments had so radically altered the Matrimonial Causes Act 1973 that England morphed spectacularly from the most conservative to the most liberal model in the comparative exercise.With no requirement to demonstrate the breakdown of the marriage, no option to defend a divorce, no mandatory period of separation before filing an application, and no court assessment, English divorce law remained the odd one out, but in quite the opposite way to the situation which had existed just a few years earlier.Building on the conference, this Special Issue provides expert analysis of divorce laws and routes to reform in Australia, Canada, England and the US.This timely cross-country 1 The new reform legislation extends to England and Wales only.Scotland and Northern Ireland each have their own 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 | 0.010 | 0.031 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.035 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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".