Artistic Expression, Aesthetic Value and the Law
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The aim of my dissertation is to develop a legally relevant theory of artistic value, based on which a judge can reliably determine whether a work has sufficient such value to be granted constitutional protection, even though it would otherwise count as obscene. Within this framework I argue that a moral flaw can count as an aesthetic virtue in a narrative work, at least when the audience learns something from the immoral imaginings that the work prescribes. Since expert testimony is sometimes required in legal cases about artistic value, I also develop a legally applicable theory of aesthetic testimony, such that expert testimony can be used to determine the valence of aesthetic properties, which is essential in determining a work’s overall artistic value. My theory of which properties of works are relevant to their aesthetic evaluation depends both on which categories the work is appreciated in, and on the conventions of those categories. I address these issues within Canadian and American legal contexts.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 it