American Legal History in Retrospect and Prospect: Reflections on the Twenty-fifth Anniversary of Morton Horwitz's Transformation of American Law
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Fifteen years ago, a decade after the appearance of his Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860, Morton Horwitz was the keynote speaker at the American Society for Legal History's annual meeting in Toronto. His address was an erudite, if idiosyncratic, excavation of the historiography of Anglo-American legal history. The occasion was particularly memorable, however, for the moment when Horwitz offered his interpretation of the scholarship of John Pocock, who as chance inevitably would have it, was at that moment sitting some 20 rows back in the A tremor of disturbance rippled outward from the twentieth row, where Professor Pocock's body language signified a certain disagreement with what he was hearing. Horwitz paused. I am aware of the likely effects of offering an intellectual history of someone who is sitting in the audience. But he didn't stop. This short essay attempts no intellectual history of Morton Horwitz. Others have already pursued that task with accomplishment (see, for example, Ernst 1993). Honoring the spirit of Horwitz's Toronto address, however, my comments will range widely across the terrain of American legal history
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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 | 0.005 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".