The Influence of Landmark Judgments and Statutory Changes on the Family Litigation Explosion: A Citation Network Analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Family law in many countries has changed radically since the 1960s. However, despite family law’s central importance, few detailed quantitative analyses of the relationship between legal developments (landmark judgments and statutory changes) and the amount and subject of family litigation have been made. We examine this relationship using a unique dataset of citations among Canadian family law judgments from all levels of the court hierarchy. The network analysis draws attention to significant changes in law and legal practice over time. Not only did litigation increase overall, but the number of judgments involving multiple legal issues grew dramatically in the mid-1990s, signaling the increasing complexity of litigation surrounding family breakdowns. We probe this emergent co-occurrence of legal issues using citation network analysis and find clear links to the jurisprudential changes introduced through the landmark 1992 judgment Moge v Moge and the 1997 Federal Child Support Guidelines.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.080 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.026 | 0.050 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| 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".