Book Review: Dewigged, Bothered and Bewildered: British Colonial Judges on Trial, 1800–1900
Bibliographic record
Abstract
True understanding of the law must be based on an appreciation of the history and evolution of its institutions, practices and rules. This fundamental principle is illustrated by John McLaren’s Dewigged, Bothered and Bewildered: British Colonial Judges on Trial, 1800-1900, published under the auspices of the Francis Forbes Society for Australian Legal History and the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History. This reminder is of particular significance given the uncertain fate of legal history teaching in many Australian law schools. John McLaren, Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Law at the University of Victoria (British Columbia, Canada) has an extraordinary and distinguished record of legal historical scholarship, and is a frequent visitor to Australia and contributor to the Australian legal history milieu. Dewigged is, primarily, a study of the removal of troublesome judges from the colonies in the nineteenth century. Its aims, however, are broader — to provide an insight into the role of judges in colonial administration, as perceived in the colonies and in Britain, during a century of enormous legal change throughout the empire.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.019 | 0.007 |
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".