Bibliographic record
Abstract
This chapter draws on qualitative empirical research to explore how Canadian Contracts teachers conceive of the relationship between theory and practice. Based on semi-structured interviews and course materials, it demonstrates that when professors talk about their teaching (goals, rationales, and practices), they overwhelmingly tend to view theory and practice as mutually reinforcing. This finding complicates and renders problematic a primary trope in legal education, whereby the academy and the profession are viewed as polar opposites in a struggle over jurisdiction. However, it also details how when professors talk about their role, or the mission of a law school, they do speak in oppositional terms about theory and practice. Accordingly, professors tend to treat theory and practice in oppositional terms when talking about their mission or the institution’s mission, but in integrative terms when talking about their teaching. This contrast leads to a number of insights. First is the relevance of conducting empirical research into legal education at an individual scale, to escape the taken-for-granted “grammar” of the discourse in legal education that tends to focus on the macro scale of curricular and institutional design. Second, it provokes reflection on the duality of roles that law professors either experience or articulate. Do law professors have a split identity, do they inhabit multiple roles simultaneously, or is the contrast simply an illustration of the tendency to say one thing, and do another? This chapter poses these questions and concludes with the suggestion that empirical research into legal education may be generative of new frameworks of discourse, ones that capture more fully the “operative” problems in legal education.
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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 | 0.027 | 0.036 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.071 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.028 | 0.021 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.003 |
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".