The Hand is Invisible, Nature Knows Best, and Justice is Blind: Markets, Ecosystems, Legal Instrumentalism, and the Natural Law of Systems
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In modern welfare states, instrumentalism abounds. Law is viewed as a means to an end, or a tool for the social good. Courts frequently rely on policy grounds to justify idiosyncratic results in particular cases. Governments develop policies and programs designed to address a multitude of specific social issues. Legislatures grant administrative agencies broad mandates with minimal oversight, and officials act with their own initiative to craft solutions to what they perceive as pressing community needs. Everywhere state actors take it upon themselves to pursue the ends they deem appropriate. In this article, I argue that legal instrumentalism is inconsistent with the nature of dynamic systems, and in particular ecosystems and markets. The notion of dictating particular ecological or economic ends conflicts with the natural behavior of these systems and their immutable rules. Ecosystems and markets may be interfered with, but the nature of their processes cannot be altered. The idea of dictating specific ecological or economic results is inconsistent with the way they behave. The appropriate role for law is to set generally applicable boundaries within which markets operate, and to establish generally applicable limits on the degree to which human actions encroach upon ecosystems. Its proper mandate is to protect these systems from manipulation rather than to seek to manipulate them. Law is a system too. The natural law of systems is based not upon moral preferences but upon abstract features that resemble those of ecosystems and markets: generally applicable rules and principles, intrinsic neutrality, internal coherence and integrity, and autonomous individuals. The mandate of decision-makers is not to 'do right' but instead to 'let the system speak.' Once generally applicable legal parameters are established, the 'right' result is what the system says it is. The right price is the price dictated by competitive supply and demand. The right environmental conditions are those produced by protected, unmanaged ecosystems. The right decision is that prescribed by the generally applicable principles of a precedent-based system of law.
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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 | 0.009 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.084 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.021 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".