Patchwork Law Reform: Your Idea Is Good in Practice, but It Won't Work in Theory
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article elaborates a conception of law reform that is pluralistic, interactional, non-formulaic, attentive to implicit normativity and not exclusively instrumental. It argues that law reform practice is always informed by theory. Where theory is inadequate, law reform practice is likely to result in a sub-optimal patchwork. An appropriate theory of law reform will have the following attributes. First, it will have a respect for human agency. This respect is made manifest in law reform on dimensions of form, substance, purpose, authority, mode, regime, sites, and system. Second, an adequate practice of law reform must attend to structural features of legal institutions, and in particular the systematic and symbolic character of explicit reform to legislative texts. It must also account for the dimensions of interaction between different normative institutions, and various types of implicit law reform activity that does not appear in changes to legislative texts. Finally, it must be grounded in a sensitivity to socio-cultural context. It is argued in conclusion that an adequate theory and practice of law reform will be less reform than re-substance, and a transformation in ideas of law will engender a transubstantiation of its practice.
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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 | 0.020 | 0.041 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.053 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.038 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.003 |
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".