Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract For the past four years, two instructors and approximately one hundred students have participated in a novel experiment in liberal arts legal education. Legal Inquiry, an upper-year course in the Arts & Science Program at McMaster University, seeks to “demystify legal knowledge for the curious student of the world.” It brings together two kindred yet previously isolated academic traditions: an open-ended inquiry approach to knowledge and a critical pluralist understanding of law. To explore the compatibility of “law” and “inquiry,” the instructors wanted students to gain confidence and skills in engaging with formal legal sources, apply critical thinking to law, and appreciate informal and everyday law. These objectives were met with surprising success given the brevity of the course. Students achieved a basic understanding of formal law and legal reasoning, generated a vocabulary of what it means to think critically about law, and began to identify the continuity of formal and informal law.
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 | 0.022 | 0.039 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.018 | 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".