The king’s two bodies and the Crown a corporation sole: historical dualities in English legal thinking
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As Kantorowicz acknowledged in his seminal work on the theological groundings of medieval political theory, the legal doctrine of the king’s two bodies was not a medieval legal doctrine but an Elizabethan one. It was developed by Plowden, an English jurist, in the second half of the sixteenth century. With Plowden’s theory of the king’s two bodies – one natural and the other politic – the medieval notion of the Crown as a corporation aggregate of many was progressively abandoned. The king’s body politic was instead confused with the concept of office of kingship, which could only vest in the king. Building on Plowden’s doctrine, Coke wrote of the king’s body politic in the early seventeenth century that it was a corporation sole. With time, the Crown conceived as a corporation sole and as a corporation aggregate understood as the government became an important feature of English legal thought. The Crown as a corporation aggregate – comprising the whole realm – is more apt to reflect the constitutional arrangement reached after the Glorious Revolution, characterised by the sovereignty of Parliament and, later, responsible government.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
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".