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Record W3038768791

As If: Why Legal Scholarship Needs Assumptions

2020· article· en· W3038768791 on OpenAlexaff
Shai Dothan

Bibliographic record

VenueeYLS (Yale Law School) · 2020
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldBusiness, Management and Accounting
TopicInternational Arbitration and Investment Law
Canadian institutionsCentre for International Governance Innovation
FundersDanmarks GrundforskningsfondNational Research Foundation
KeywordsFalse accusationScholarshipNorm (philosophy)TreatyLaw and economicsArgument (complex analysis)LawPolitical scienceEpistemologySociologyPhilosophy
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

A common accusation against law and economics is that it is based on unrealistic and unreasonable assumptions, such as claiming that people behave rationally. This accusation may very well be true. But it should not stand in the way of progress in legal analysis. The reason is that when something is assumed about facts — for example, how people behave or, alternatively, about the best way to interpret a set of judgments — the test of this assumption is in whether the hypotheses built on it are supported or refuted by other facts. If an assumption does not lead to accurate predictions, it can easily be discarded. In contrast, conceptual analysis of law that tries to assess the nature of a legal norm or field, for example establishing whether investment treaty arbitration is a part of public international law or not, is not assuming anything about facts. Because the only substance that is played with is concepts, no facts can be brought to refute the argument, only competing narratives. The purpose of this paper is to explain why the process of making assumptions is necessary for legal scholarship and why it is impossible to understand the law without assumptions and it could be dangerous to try to do so.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.059
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.129
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Commentary · Consensus signal: Commentary
Teacher disagreement score0.059
Threshold uncertainty score0.315

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0590.129
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0030.002
Science and technology studies0.0070.070
Scholarly communication0.0170.058
Open science0.0040.009
Research integrity0.0150.022
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0070.002

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.

Opus teacher head0.028
GPT teacher head0.248
Teacher spread0.220 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreCommentary

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".

Quick stats

Citations4
Published2020
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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Same venueeYLS (Yale Law School)Same topicInternational Arbitration and Investment LawFrench-language works237,207