Legal History As Legal Scholarship: Doctrinalism, Interdisciplinarity, and Critical Analysis of Law
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Legal history is having a methodological moment. So is law (and, as it turns out, history as well). And not just in one country or legal system but across the common law/civil law divide. In this essay I try to capture some aspects of this methodological moment — or moments — and then to add some reflections of my own that locate legal history within the enterprise of legal scholarship. More specifically, I will outline an approach to legal history that regards historical analysis as one mode of critical analysis of law, along with other modes of “interdisciplinary” analysis (economical, philosophical, sociological, literary, etc.) and “doctrinal” analysis. In this way, legal history plays a key role in the general effort to move beyond the long-standing and rhetorically useful, but ultimately unproductive, distinction between “modern” and “traditional” legal scholarship, and that between “common law” and “civil law” scholarship besides. According to this view of legal history, it is a mode of jurisprudence (in fact, we might call it New Historical Jurisprudence) rather than a sub-specialty of law or a form of applied history.
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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 | 0.010 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.080 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.022 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 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".