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This paper shares results of a study of judgments applying the common law as adapted to the cohabitation context. Specifically, the Supreme Court of Canada has held that couples who formed a 'joint family venture' may need to share the wealth gained during cohabitation. The study compares the couples leading to positive and negative findings of a joint family venture. Positive findings correlate with traditional markers of family and economic integration, such as joint bank accounts and the presence of children. Despite the discourse of family diversity, gendered patterns run across all the couples, with women assuming primary care of children, shouldering domestic labour, and making career sacrifices for the family. In a sign of the limits of judge-made reforms, the doctrine may be harder for some claimants to access than for others, in ways not necessarily tracking commitment and economic integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses queer theory, specifically literature onBowers v. Hardwick, to analyze debates over legislation proposed in Quebec regarding covered faces. Queer theory sheds light on legal responses to the veil. Parliamentary debates in Quebec reconstitute the polity, notably as secular and united. The paper highlights the contradictory and unstable character of four binaries: legislative text versus social practice, act versus status, majority versus minority, and knowable versus unknowable. As with contradictory propositions about homosexuality, contradiction does not undermine discourse but makes it stronger and more agile. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With analytical and methodological aims, this paper raises the difficulties of studying how well the financial frameworks governing marriage and divorce might serve the catchment group of same-sex couples to whom they are henceforth available. It calls for disaggregating the legal content of marriage for the purposes of analysis. By reference to the empirical social science, it then sets out the basis for challenging the assumption that access to marriage on the existing terms best remedies same-sex couples' long-time legal neglect. But crucial methodological difficulties arise when looking to research in order to assess the fitness of existing marriage law for same-sex couples. The available data do not speak to key elements of marriage law. Underscoring the limits of social science research, the paper draws out the role of justice and identity claims in marriage law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper contributes to debates on the role of appellate judges in the uncertain field of family law. It takes as point of departure recent judgments by the Supreme Court of Canada regarding children. Repeated scholarly criticisms that the judgments provide inadequate guidance for trial judges and lawyers call for scrutiny: the criticisms overlook live debates on the appropriateness of judicial deference to legislative instrument choice, as well as the difficulty of judicial rule making in a fractious field where little social consensus obtains on key distributive questions. Family scholars might fruitfully explore constitutional theorists' work on human rights, institutional expertise, and deference. It is also worth reading the judgments' moral signals against the backdrop of research on regulation and social norms. Perhaps the judgments provide guidance, but not of the expected kind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]