Law and development: Forty years after ‘Scholars in Self-Estrangement’
Bibliographic record
Abstract
‘Scholars in Self-Estrangement’ was a major milestone in the field of law and development. In a paper delivered in 2014 at the University of Toronto on the Fortieth Anniversary of its publication, the author looked back over four decades. He observed that the field was created in the 1960s as an adjunct of development assistance but soon sought to become an independent academic endeavour: seeking to make the field more academic, the article critiqued early efforts as too policy dependent and ethnocentric. But shortly after the article was published, law and development slowed down: it had lost support of development agencies before it could establish a secure place in the academy. Then, by the 1990s, it had revived, and today there is a proliferation of research, much of which has avoided the errors pointed to in ‘Scholars.’ However, the field has now split into a number of subdisciplines that do not always communicate with one another, despite the interdependence of different facets of development. To the challenge created by this fragmentation are added two other main concerns: new theories of development that stress experimentation and local variation, and the irreducible local embeddedness of legal systems. These suggest a need for greater emphasis on context for the definition of reform strategies and raise questions about the viability of general laws about the relation between law and development. Thus, the author notes here that the field now confronts the twin challenges of interdependence and context. Recognizing that there is no easy formula to meet these challenges, he concludes that building capacity in the Global South for interdisciplinary- and policy-oriented work is a necessary first step.
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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 | 0.024 | 0.025 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.074 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.022 | 0.024 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.016 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".