The Power to Govern Men and Things’: Patriarchal Origins of the Police Power in American Law
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores the genealogy of the most expansive, and yet least scrutinized, of governmental powers: the police power. The power to police, as "the power to govern men and things," is invoked in support of a vast expanse of legislation and regulation at all levels of governance, from the national government through the states and down to the smallest municipalities, including American criminal law in its entirety. At the same time it is a commonplace of American constitutional law that the police power "is, and must be from its very nature, incapable of any very exact definition or limitation." "The Power to Govern Men and Things" argues that the essential limitlessness of the police power reflects its origins in the householder's patriarchal authority over his household, including "men" (animate household resources such as wives, children, servants, slaves, and animals) and "things" (inanimate resources such as buildings, tools, and land). In the words of Blackstone's much-quoted definition, the power to police is the power of the "pater patriae" to maintain "the domestic order of the kingdom: whereby the individuals of the state, like members of a well-governed family, are bound to conform their general behaviour to the rules of propriety, good neighbourhood, and good manners: and to be decent, industrious, and inoffensive in their respective stations."
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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 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".