Much to Do About Something: Destabilizing Law\u27s Support of Dominant Ideologies in the Context of Lesbian Mother Custody Claims in Canada

This article surveys a very specific legal context: the claims of mothers, who are lesbians, in custody disputes over their children, with their heterosexual ex-spouses, in Canadian courts. The author examines the developments in judgments surrounding custody involving a lesbian mother over the past two and a half decades, focusing on the line of reasoning within the judgments rather than the substantive results (that is, to whom custody is granted). The end result will be an attempt to better understand the interaction between law as a discourse and the dominant ideologies of familialism, motherhood, and heteronormativity. In Part Two, the author sets the legal stage by outlining the specificities of custody law, which remain relatively insulated from other aspects of legal equality discourse. Next, she problematizes the underlying assumptions of the dominant ideologies of familialism, motherhood, and heteronormativity, and the support they receive in law. For this section, the author draws mainly from feminist work to deconstruct the institutions of family and motherhood and their effect on the oppression of women in society. The article will also show how these ideologies interact with each other, and in tandem with the ideology of heteronormativity, to oppress the experiences of lesbians in law – in particular, lesbian mothers. Part Three cites specific examples of lesbian mothers\u27 custody claims, outlining the dominant approaches judges have taken in certain historical periods, and shows how these approaches support the perpetuation of dominant ideologies and the consequent marginalization of lesbian mothers. Lastly, Part Four offers some preliminary conclusions and proposes a principled legal approach which may assist in avoiding the mistakes of the past

Adding Social Condition to the Canadian Human Rights Act

Almost a decade ago, in June 2000, the Canadian Human Rights Act Review Panel conducted a comprehensive review of the Canadian Human Rights Act [CHRA] and recommended that “social condition” be added as a prohibited ground of discrimination. Since then, no action has been taken to implement this recommendation, despite calls for action from international bodies, political actors, human rights agencies and organizations, and academic commentators to provide protections from discrimination for those suffering from social and economic disadvantage. The authors analyze the experiences at the provincial level with socio-economic grounds of discrimination, jurisprudential developments under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms related to claims based on socio-economic disadvantage, the broader proposal of incorporating justiciable social and economic rights into Canadian law, and the range of arguments both for and against recognizing social condition as a prohibited ground of discrimination. In the end, the authors recommend a feasible and practical means for adding social condition to the Canadian Human Rights Act so that it will provide predictability for administrators, adjudicators and respondents, as well as sufficient flexibility to reflect the multi-faceted and intersectional experience of discrimination of human rights claimants. While socio-economic inequality continues to be a significant and pressing problem in need of a multi-pronged and comprehensive solution, the addition of the ground of social condition to the CHRA will be one more tool in advancing the rights and interests of those on the very margins of Canadian society

Data on race, inequality, and social capital in the U.S. counties

This article presents data on social capital at the United States’ county-level. Following Rupasingha et al. (2006), the social capital index captures the common factor among density measures of 10 different types of associations, voter turnout rates, U.S. decennial census participation rates, and the number of non-profit organizations. Based on Knack (2003), we create associational densities measures as a proxy for both bridging and bonding social capital. Including data on income inequality, racial diversity, minority group size, average household income, educational attainment, the ratio of a family household, the size of migration population, and female labor market participation rates, the data covers 3,104 U.S. counties for both 2009 and 2014. This paper includes descriptive statistics and figures. This data article is associated with the article “Race, Inequality, and Social Capital in the U.S. Counties.

Race, inequality, and social capital in the U.S. counties

This study examines how the interplay between racial diversity and economic inequality affects variations of social capital in the U.S. counties. In general, racial and economic heterogeneity is assumed to provide a negative environment for the growth of social capital. Building on this, we argue the effect of economic inequality is weaker than that of racial diversity because increased economic heterogeneity is felt less visibly and acutely than racial heterogeneity. Moreover, economic inequality can positively condition the adverse impact of racial diversity on social capital when the two interact. Based on the crosscutting cleavages theory, income inequality in a racially fragmented community works as an additional cleavage that crosscuts the different racial groups, mitigating the negative impact of racial diversity on social capital. The data analysis of 3,140 U.S. counties in 2009-2014 provides strong evidence for our arguments. Our findings offer important implications in understanding inequality, race and American democracy

Reducing the Democratic Deficit: Representation, Diversity, and the Canadian Judiciary, or Towards a Triple P Judiciary

The authors review the current structures for judicial appointments in Canada and provide statistical information about the results of these mechanisms in respect to diversity of representation on the courts. They are also critical of the fairness and openness of judicial appointments processes. After examining several variants of the dominant liberal view of law and of judges, the authors proffer and articulate a neo-realist theory of law and what they term a bungee cord theory of judging. According to the former, law is inevitably a form of politics; according to the latter, judges are unavoidably political actors. In consequence, the judiciary is properly subject to democratic norms, including especially the norms of representation and diversity. The authors then argue that, judged against those democratic norms, the present systems of judicial appointment (and the judiciary which it has put in place) suffers from what they term a democratic deficit. After a detailed examination of past attempts to reform this system, of arguments for and against a more democratic and representational approach to judicial selection, and possible models of judicial selection, the authors propose their own reform: the establishment by statute of Judicial Appointments Commissions. Such an approach might help cure the democratic deficit and produce what they dub a Triple-P judiciary, that is, one that is politically accountable, professionally qualified, and proportionally representative

Impossibility Theorems for Feature Attribution

Despite a sea of interpretability methods that can produce plausible explanations, the field has also empirically seen many failure cases of such methods. In light of these results, it remains unclear for practitioners how to use these methods and choose between them in a principled way. In this paper, we show that for moderately rich model classes (easily satisfied by neural networks), any feature attribution method that is complete and linear -- for example, Integrated Gradients and SHAP -- can provably fail to improve on random guessing for inferring model behaviour. Our results apply to common end-tasks such as characterizing local model behaviour, identifying spurious features, and algorithmic recourse. One takeaway from our work is the importance of concretely defining end-tasks: once such an end-task is defined, a simple and direct approach of repeated model evaluations can outperform many other complex feature attribution methods.Comment: 36 pages, 4 figures. Significantly expanded experiment

Ambivalent resistance and public secrets : contesting "the truth"

This thesis explores a youth cultural movement in Male', the Capital Island and urban center of the Republic of the Maldives. I will focus on the dialectic between the strict social control over society enforced by penal tactics and the censorship of expression in a social context whereby the imagining potential of youths has broadened, as well as the social frameworks in which young people negotiate identity. I argue that increased education and exposure to alternate ideologies and lifestyles have led to a greater consciousness of human rights discourses and an increased desire to participate with the changes underway among many youths in Male'. The youthful innovations discussed reflect ideological struggles that challenge the government's monopoly over information and dominant social representations. I will show the central role of exposure in these challenges to official 'truth' and the possibilities opened up by wireless communication, digital cameras and the Internet for disseminating information anonymously and with fewer boundaries. The examples of resistance discussed draw attention to the ambivalence of certain forms of agency. They demonstrate that resistance can be self-destructive or intentionally ambiguous by using parody and innuendos. These examples support the argument for broader considerations of resistance independent of assumptions of efficacy or success in altering existing structures, intentionality for emancipation and affirmative action