Depending on how the contract/ketubah is written, can a religious court annul a marriage if the husband is unable or unwilling to fulfill their obligations as husband? It's something that one of the documents in the JOFA website calls a "recalcitrant husband". I'm looking for a halachic definition of a husband who is essentially in contempt of court, is missing, and will not work in good faith towards a mutually acceptable solution. If I start looking at Gittin in the Talmud, do you think I'll find anything? I was going to start at 31a based on a footnote of one of the other documents I was reading, fwiw...
I'm not talking about a precondition in the ketubah that removes the husbands rights... I'm talking about a court finding that a husband is literally not able to do what they said they would do in the ketubah. In these cases, what happens? Is there a get? Is it divorce, annulment, something else entirely?
The halachic word you're looking for is a
mesarev (from the word
siruv - to refuse)
. That's someone who ignores a court order to appear in court.
In general, I wouldn't suggest turning to the Talmud to find the actual Law. For that, we would turn to codifiers like Maimonides or the Shulchan Aruch. It's a little bit tricky with the Talmud, because we don't always rely on the Talmud to tell us what the Law is, we rely on rules for that. So you can have the Talmud quote someone who says that the Law is X, or the Talmud may even do so itself, but in that particular type of circumstance, we don't actually hold by that opinion and the Law is really Y. The rules themselves also come from the Talmud, so it's not like we're not really relying on the Talmud. The point being, that unless you're already aware of the relevant rule (which likely won't appear on the same page, if even the same chapter or tractate!), you can be lead to thinking that the Law is what it's not.
I'd like to preface the rest of my response by explaining that marriage/divorce is handled very carefully in Jewish Law. Aside from the severe prohibition involved (if the divorce or annulment wasn't done correctly and the woman unknowingly remarries both her and her second husband have unknowingly committed adultery), the children of a second marriage could potentially be ruined for life if a mistake is made. A significant amount of the responsa literature is devoted towards cases of marriage/divorce simply because the Laws are complicated and the stakes are high, so the local Rabbi would rather forward unusual cases to an expert in the field. I even vaguely recall having read one responsa where a young local Rabbi attached his own thoughts to the question he sent and the answering Rabbi (I believe it was Rabbi Moshe Schreiber) spent the first page or column just ripping into him for even thinking about it at his level of expertise.
Back to your question. It's not really possible to annul a marriage unless there was a problem in the process of the marriage itself. Which is possible (let's say if there's a problem with the witnesses), but pretty rare. They both know what the product is that's being bought/sold (or at least, it's pretty difficult to prove otherwise), so we'd need to find a problem with the sale itself to invalidate it. It's like walking into a shoe store and complaining three months later that you thought you were buying an apple instead of a pair of Nikes.
The contractual obligations of the kesubah aren't stipulations for the marriage, but reciprocal agreements within it, ie. he provides X, Y, Z and she gives A, B, C. You can maybe say, I'm not giving you X if you don't give me A, but the marriage itself wasn't on condition of receiving X or A. The thing is that the kesubah isn't part of the process of engagement, it's part of the process of marriage. In Jewish law, marriage is a two-step process: the engagement (described above) and the matrimony. The kesubah [is generally signed after the engagement and] doesn't come into force until the matrimony. So it takes place after the groom has already bought the right to marry her and that needs to be returned to her.
What we do have, is a different condition - I'm sure there's a legal parallel for it - where the court has jurisdiction on your property (not ownership), so they can somewhat retroactively remove the money from the husband's possession that was used to buy the right, so that the sale never took place. In practice though, this is only done in situations where there's a technical issue with the marriage or divorce process itself (and even then, very very rarely) not a problem with their relationship or dispositions. We're not socialists after all and the court doesn't own everybody's stuff. This is a tool for enabling the court to impose fines and facilitate inheritances, not for making sure people act like mature adults.
What the court can and does do with cases where the husband or wife doesn't fulfill their marital obligations - either those that are Biblically mandated or those that are stipulated in the kesubah, is to try to embarrass them into giving/receiving the divorce, by publicizing his/her recalcitrance. Obviously this has limited results. There are also some cases the court can also "converse" with the husband until he changes his mind. You may have read about a case in NY recently of a Rabbi who was arrested for having made use of this type of conversation to help women get divorced.