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This article addresses important, neglected questions of legal craft in relation to rights challenges to legislation, especially equality claims. It considers the perspective from which to assess multiple parts of a complex scheme in a challenge under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Is the challenge best framed against the scheme as a whole - all or nothing - or against the separate parts? The framing or perspective can have serious implications for the outcome. Furthermore, a private litigant, motivated by self-interest in her individual circumstances, may frame the challenge in a way that does not advance a larger group's interests or even harms them. To study these matters, the article focuses on Quebec (Attorney General) v A, which upheld the exclusion of unmarried couples from provincial marriage law. Adding to the existing concerns about the prominence of corporate litigants and the class biases of judges, that appeal exemplifies another type of rights case in which money talks. [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]