“Adultery” in Canadian Family Law: A Zombie Category?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The focus of this thesis is upon the construction of “adultery” within Canadian divorce law. I argue that this legal construct is exemplary of what social theorist Ulrich Beck described as a “zombie category” - a moribund concept that haunts the living. It is my contention that this construct is unconstitutionally vague and should be jettisoned. I locate the origins of this matrimonial fault and chart its development over time. I emphasize that until recently, the definition of adultery that informed Canadian family law was robustly heterosexist, phallocentric and anchored in an understanding of procreation as the sine qua non of marriage. Adultery, as defined in Kahl v Kahl (1943), [1943] OJ No 365 referred to "voluntary sexual intercourse by a married person with another person of the opposite sex other than his or her spouse.” In a post-Charter era, P(SE) v P(DD), 2005 BCSC 439 and Thebeau v Thebeau, 2006 NBBR 154 made clear that the definition of adultery must be consistent with the governing legislation and the values that the Charter enshrines. However, neither case furnished a definition of adultery that serves this purpose and, as of 2020, this void remains unfilled. I forward two models of how adultery might be operationalized in judicial determinations of the occurrence of this matrimonial fault and describe the problems that inhere in each.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".