Une épistémologie du droit : L'État providence de François Ewald
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When scholarly research in law confines itself to source materials, it effectively allows positive law to prescribe the limits of the intellectual enquiry. When it does not so confine itself, scholarly research gradually erases as it progresses the boundary between the object of its own enquiry and that of other disciplines in the human sciences. In the author's view, if ultimately law is to be seen as more than standardized common sense armed with a big stick, it must become responsive, from within, to the findings of these disciplines. But this process of integration raises serious methodological difficulties. Their solution, assuming there is one, will draw on epistemology and a reexamination of the relationship between law and knowledge. One recent and most commendable contribution to legal epistemology is François Ewald's L'Étatprovidence. The author, a philosopher, sets out to explain how the fundamental rationality of the French legal system was transformed at the beginning of the XXth century. Having first described the respective functions of law, morality and benevolence in the post revolutionary liberal model, Ewald then shows how probability theory made possible the development of statistics, modern sociology and « insurance technology ». The advent of a workmen's compensation scheme, a result of these developments, marked an epistemological breaking point French private law. From then onwards, the order of distributive justice never ceased to expand: risk became the rule and fault the exception. The change is now irreversible and the modern Welfare State has created its own original brand of justice. Michel Foucault's influence is often noticeable in L'État providence, a complex but fascinating book which illustrates why philosophy, legal scholarship and law, although capable of sharing certain outlooks, must forever remain distinct.
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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 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.038 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".