Bibliographic record
Abstract
Legal history and the social history of law have become very active fields of research in Britain, the United States, and Canada in the past ten years.Moreover, they have begun to affect each other, so that social historians are now much more sensitive to doctrinal changes, shifts in legal rules, and legal concepts, while legal historians increasingly appreciate that explaining legal change -or the lack of itmay require extensive research outside the law library.In short, lawyers and historians are beginning to meet not only in law libraries, but also in archives.And, like all users, they are asking the impossible.From law librarians, they want every variant edition of every obscure and outdated procedural manual, every ancient set of reports, every printed trial extant for earlier centuries.Fortunately, large international microfilming projects are increasingly making it possible for librarians to supply all of these, and even extensive manuscript collections of legal materials.But historians of law make more outrageous demands on archivists: retain everything; prepare finding aids for everything; manage your collections with us, above all others, in mind.I am told that the professional duties of archivists include measuring such demands by the tests of budgets, conservation imperatives, the interests of other users, the finite dimension of the working year, available storage space, and a healthy instinct for preservation of self as well as collections.But since I am a user, not an archivist, I shall innocently describe utopia, and say little about how to get there.My only excuse for doing so is that legal records, like all records, present specific problems, problems that are not particularly evident without close familiarity with the recent large research literature, much of it still in dissertation form, on the legal and social history of the law.A review of some of its themes may help archivists, lawyers, and historians to discuss some of the hard decisions about retention.One of my conclusions is that lawyers and historians may in fact have rather different professional imperatives, even conflicting ones, and that the historically and legally informed archivist will necessarily play a critical role in adjudicating between them.
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.
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 | 0.053 | 0.056 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.016 | 0.020 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.074 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.050 | 0.074 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.016 |
| Research integrity | 0.019 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.002 |
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".