‘A More Exact Purity’: Legal Authority and Conspicuous Amalgamation in Early Modern English Law Guides and the Oxford Law Lectures of Sir Robert Chambers and Samuel Johnson
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper finds that early modern and later texts explaining legal vocabulary and history to non-professionals bring into focus two vying conceptions of enforcing narrative and terminological purity (a notion inextricably bound up with the authority to produce legal narratives): decontamination, according to one perspective, and enrichment to strengthen an essence, according to another view. The lexicons generally promote a notion of ‘purity’ that does not connote the removal of contaminants or foreign matter but rather depends on adulteration and heterogeneous additions. This paper argues that legal guide writers believed that cultivating impressions, and even illusions, of corporate authorship was key to attracting readers, who (the writers expected) perceived conspicuous reliance on numerous, diverse (foreign as well as domestic) sources as a mark of legitimacy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".