Rethinking Volks v Robinson: The implications of appliying a "contextualised choice model" to prospective South African domestic partnership legislation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The article considers certain critical failings of the so-called "choice argument" (that \nis the view that, by opting to cohabit in a life partnership rather than marry or enter \ninto a civil partnership, a life partner is not entitled to the legal benefits provided by \nmatrimonial [property] law) as it was applied to opposite-sex life partnerships by the \nmajority of the Constitutional Court in Volks v Robinson.1 On the basis of Canadian \njurisprudence, a "contextualised choice model" is developed that distinguishes \nbetween need-based claims and those involving property disputes, and holds that \nthe "choice argument" could at best be relevant regarding the latter category of \nclaims, while the existence of a reciprocal duty of support is sine qua non for any \nneed-based claim to succeed. These findings are applied to registered and \nunregistered domestic partnerships under the draft Domestic Partnerships Bill, 2008, \nwith the aim of suggesting certain amendments to the Bill in the hope of ensuring a more consistent and principled legal position once the Bill is enacted.
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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 | 0.040 | 0.040 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.043 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".