Bibliographic record
Abstract
Law is a parochial business whose character and content depends on local institutions, events, and understandings. Thus it is that the most learned scholar of English law can be an ignoramus about Estonian law, let alone the law of remote societies or ancient times. To call law parochial may sound like a complaint. It is not—law would be of less value were it not firmly rooted in the societies it serves. But it does raise the question of how far we can hope for a theory of law. Particular facts can be explained; but to have a theory is to have an explanation at some level of generality. It is one thing to theorize doctrines within a legal system, to develop the branches of special jurisprudence; but how far can we work out a general jurisprudence, a theory of law as such, that will apply to contracts and to constitutions, and in Estonia as much as in England? Not every project that calls itself a ‘general theory’ is intelligible. Back when political scientists aspired to general theories of politics, Alasdair MacIntyre mocked them with a parable about an eccentric quest for the general theory of holes.1 It was a needed warning; but in law things are not yet that dire. Modern jurisprudence does not advance a unified theory of everything that is properly called ‘law’, including the law of England, the moral law, de Morgan’s laws, and Boyle’s law.2 All the same, it does aspire to great generality, and there is the question of how even that can be done.
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 | 0.007 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.026 | 0.017 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.031 | 0.020 |
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".