Bibliographic record
Abstract
The public/private distinction was “slain” in 1982. That year, at the Symposium of the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Professor Duncan Kennedy set forth his six Stages of the Decline of the Public/Private Distinction, outlining the sequence by which liberal categorizations descend “from robust good health to utter decrepitude.” Professor Kennedy’s famed article concerned the history of legal thought over the course of the twentieth century. He described that history as one of “decline”—not just of the public/private distinction, but of numerous other distinctions said to “constitute the liberal way of thinking about the social world.” He pronounced on the lifecycle of these ideas and the way in which they—and the public/private distinction in particular—had become unjustifiable in legal thought. It was “[h]ard cases with large stakes” that were the first sign of trouble, precipitating compromise until distinctions all but collapsed, only to be reanimated as “continua” or pro/con “balancing” formulae6 until they became something “we can’t believe in ... any more.” In this Essay, I put to one side legal history and turn attention to the process of decline itself. For it is not only legal distinctions that are problematic. There are, indeed, many errant categorizations that fit the story of decline. My target is the so‐called fish/mammal distinction. “Fish,” it will be shown, is an indistinct category. But if it nonetheless remains acceptable for people (and biologists) to speak in terms of fish, might it be okay for people (and lawyers) to speak in terms of private law?
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 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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| 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".