Book Note: Ordinary Meaning, A Theory Of The Most Fundamental Principle Of Legal Interpretation, by Brian G. Slocum
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ORDINARY MEANING IS A COMPREHENSIVE LOOK at the “ordinary meaning doctrine” used by courts to interpret language. The ordinary meaning doctrine is the “judicial commitment to interpreting language in legal texts according to its ‘ordinary meaning.’”2 This interpretation is based on an objective standard: the meaning of a word can exist independently of differing opinions of that meaning.3 This book argues that the current system used by judges in the United States fails to attain the goal of deciphering the ordinary meaning of words.4 Slocum argues that the ordinary meaning doctrine has not been examined in great depth,5 and offers a framework for how legal interpretation of ordinary meaning should be established.6
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 | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.004 |
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".