Of Priors and of Disconnects: How 'Chicago' Premises Risk Distortion
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay is a response to Professor Michelle E. Boardman’s piece, 127 Harv. L. Rev. 1967 (2014), reviewing my book, Boilerplate: The Fine Print, Vanishing Rights, and the Rule of Law (Princeton 2013). I argue for the perhaps self-evident proposition that intellectual preconceptions (“priors”) can skew one’s understanding of a text, and in particular, that “Chicago” priors apparently make it difficult to parse critique. In this essay I describe “Chicago” priors, then use examples to argue that these priors led Boardman not only to misinterpret the major thrust of Boilerplate but also to misunderstand many of its details. I suggest that these priors, which are common in contemporary American legal thought, distort and obscure central issues relating to contemporary contract theory and practice.
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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 | 0.033 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.036 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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".