Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canadian common law contract law casebooks are beset with a tension. On the one hand, they all reveal a sustained commitment to the “wholesale assault on the jurisprudence of forms, concepts, and rules” that typifies American Legal Realism and its intellectual descendants. Concern with underlying values, functional reasoning, social realities, and policy thinking pervades the explicit messages of Canadian contract law casebooks and their editors’ related writings. On the other hand, the two casebooks most frequently assigned embody an allegiance to rules and courts that has a close kinship with the classical attitudes purportedly rejected. They convey a monolithic image of legal reasoning that emphasizes rules, certainty, and analogical reasoning and that marginalizes policy thinking. The range of skills, and image of lawyer, communicated by the books is much narrower than their critical and realist introductions imply. Accordingly, the casebooks suggest that Canadian legal thought may be typified by theoretical eclecticism coexisting with methodological homogeneity. This characterization provokes three alternative responses. First, casebook editors may embrace this vision and mount a principled defence of it. Second, they may reject it and aim to operationalize their realist and critical commitments into a more methodologically plural casebook, as has been done in the United States. Third, a re-imagined set of teaching materials organized not around cases but around “empirically recurring problems of contracting parties” may transcend the paradigm. This last avenue holds the most promise for embodying a capacious vision of legal education.
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 | 0.015 | 0.063 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.011 | 0.013 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.023 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 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".