The Translator as a Traitor: A Comparative and Jurilinguistic Glance at the Polysemous Notion of 'Right' in Private Law
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, the author examines the difficulties encountered by the common law scholars in translating the Latin word ius and its civilian counterparts, such as droit and Recht, into English. To demonstrate this perplexity, the author analyses the works of two authoritative Englishmen who were well trained in classics – Thomas Hobbes and Sir William Blackstone. It is then argued that the translation of the word ius in the Gaian tripartite division of the law and the translation of the German counterpart Recht in Immanuel Kant’s texts are demonstrative of these “jurilinguistic” obstacles as well. The author concludes that it is very difficult for a common lawyer to identify the polysemy of the Continental understanding of “right.” The reader may in fact be surprised by the incoherent use of the technical terminology in the works of the most authoritative common law sources. It is suggested that the explanation lies in the ideological atmosphere within which common law jurists and their civilian colleagues have been working.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".