Lawyers and the Early Modern State: Regulation, Exclusion, and Numerus Clausus
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article investigates the ways in which entry to the legal profession in early modern Europe was regulated and the nature of the various interests, from the state to the judges and societies of lawyers, who sought to limit the size of the practising bar and also the lower branch of the legal profession. In part exclusionary categories were universal, having been inherited from the tradition of the ius commune, but some were very specific to particular courts and regulated at the local or national level. At the same time, such limitations and exclusions as were maintained had an effect in directing law graduates away from legal practice and towards employment in other spheres, including the butgeoning bureaucracies of western Europe. This was particularly exacerbated during periods when the level of litigation in the courts fell, as it seems to have done in a number of jurisdictions in the early eighteenth century. The tendency of lawyers to combine to protect their interests is reflected in the monopolies that sometimes arose in relation to practice in particular courts. Sometimes a highly restricted number of advocates or procurators had the right to practise in a court, and this could create practical problems which, it was argued, affected the quality of the legal decisions produced.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".