Bibliographic record
Abstract
The conflict between external and internal perspectives in private law is both exaggerated and underplayed. Both external and internal perspectives pay too little attention to how the ‘micro’ level of individual, even bilateral, interaction relates to the ‘macro’ level of society and the law as a whole. We will show that both perspectives overlook the resources they could employ to explain how the micro and macro are connected; in their different ways, external and internal perspectives do not draw out the connection between local simplicity and generalization. By treating law as a complex system, both perspectives could converge on a picture of private law in which locally simple structures of bilateral rights and duties scale up to produce emergent properties at the level of society. We suggest that functionalists should take seriously the moral norms immanent in private law – these norms are central to the functioning of private law as a system. Without these modular components, private law can be intractably complex. Accordingly, we propose an inclusive functionalism, one that takes these moral norms at face value. These moral norms perform a crucial function of managing the otherwise intractable complexity of the interactions between parties governed by private law. We also propose an inclusive internalism, which is more open to functional considerations involving simplicity. Private law must avoid intractable complexity if it is to function properly, and this calls for a simplicity criterion: internalists should look for moral norms that are both simple and generalizable. Resolving private law’s conceptual structure at the middle level focuses debate where it is needed. Important questions about the role of public values and the ultimate grounding of private law remain open and are sharpened by recognizing the role that complexity plays in the way that private law operates as a system.
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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 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.038 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.026 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.002 |
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.
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".