Jurisprudence by Aphorisms: Francis Bacon and the “Uses” of Small Forms
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The belief that Francis Bacon was, from the start, a stalwart defender of royal absolutism has prevailed in scholarship despite occasional comments about Bacon’s pluralist or collaborative legal and political imagination. Building on recent revisionist work, this article questions the standard historiography. It argues that Bacon’s jurisprudential outlook – particularly with respect to the question of legal authority – changed over the course of his career. A comparative analysis of his early and late legal writing clarifies the nature of the shift. In The Maxims of the Common Law (1596/7), Bacon theorizes a collaborative model of legal interpretation. Drawing inspiration from the use, a popular legal device and precursor of the modern trust, Bacon likens himself to a grantor who invites his readers, the grantees, to “make use of” the knowledge contained in the maxims and rules. “Learned” and “sensible” readers are welcomed as trustees of the law – provided they comply with the author’s terms of use. The collaborative, game-like spirit of this Elizabethan text is conspicuously absent in his Jacobean treatises. When Bacon revisits the subject of legal aphorisms in An Example of a Treatise on Universal Justice . . . by Aphorisms (1623), he restricts the art of legal interpretation to experts: the sovereign and a handful of elite interpreters of the law (jurisconsults). The two texts and the different jurisprudential contexts they evoke, common law and Roman law, point to a hardening of Bacon’s politics and aphoristic theory over time.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.063 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".