To Set Aside or To Not Set Aside the Agreement Pursuant to Section 56(4) of the Family Law Act: Applying Relational Theory to Domestic Contracts Involving Spousal Support Releases and Waivers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This work applies the lens of relational theory to five Ontario Superior Court of Justice cases where a party previously executed a spousal support agreement, but subsequently sought to have it set aside pursuant to section 56(4) of the Family Law Act. While the outcomes in the five cases differed as to whether section 56(4) of the Family Law Act was successfully engaged and, if so, whether the judge in turn exercised his discretion to set aside the agreement, it is argued that the cases are united by a common theme that is resonant with relational theory. The distinct relational feature of the five cases is the judges understanding of autonomy through the context-specific estimation of the wives capacity for informed consent and reflection. Chapter 1 will provide an overview of spousal support, domestic contracts and contractual autonomy in Canada. While the focus of this thesis is contractual support, the introductory section will briefly outline how entitlement to spousal support may be established on three conceptual bases. Chapter 2 will provide an overview of relational theory and review the limited scholarly literature that exists in analyzing spousal support agreements through the lens of relational theory. In this way, Chapters 1 and 2 will situate the reader and provide the necessary background to the legal analysis, commentary, reflections and critique found in Chapter 3. Chapter 3 will argue that assessing domestic contracts through a relational lens helps to explain the judicial reasoning as to why agreements were upheld or set aside while also highlighting some of the deficits in the court process and analysis. It will also highlight the lessons learned and the important implications for family law practitioners and scholars going forward.
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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 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.038 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".