Bibliographic record
Abstract
One of the marked differences between American private law and the private law of the rest of the common law world is the relative lack of interest in restitution in the former compared with the enthusiasm for the subject in the latter. It has recently been suggested that this difference has to do with the impact of legal realism on American law. It is realism’s disdain for doctrinal analysis, it is said, which explains why American scholars did not find the largely doctrinally driven work on restitution very interesting. In this article, I reject this argument, as it fails to explain why American scholars did not turn to non-doctrinal restitution scholarship in the same way they have in areas like contract or tort. I offer a different explanation instead, one that derives from the different understanding of the relationship between law and politics among (mainstream) American and Commonwealth lawyers. I argue that it is this difference that explains both why Commonwealth lawyers felt the need to develop restitution as a solution to outstanding problems in other areas of private law and why American lawyers, in their different political tradition, had little need for restitution to perform this role. I further argue that legal realism does not explain the difference between the United States and the Commonwealth on this matter. On the contrary, I argue that the very different fates of legal realism in the United States and in other parts of the common law world are explained by the very same underlying differences between law and politics the article identifies.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.036 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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".