On the Interdependence of Liberal and Illiberal/Authoritarian Legal Forms in Racial Capitalist Regimes…The Case of the United States
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Scholars conventionally distinguish between liberal and illiberal, or authoritarian, legal orders. Such distinctions are useful but often simplistic and misleading, as many regimes are governed by plural, dual, or hybrid legal institutions, principles, and practices. This is no less true for the United States, which often is misidentified as the paradigmatic liberal constitutional order. Historical and critical scholarship, including recent studies of law under racial capitalism, provide reason to identify American law as a dual state in which legal forms that govern property ownership, contract relations, and civil liberties of free citizens differ from the more illiberal, authoritarian legal forms that rule over subaltern populations, particularly racialized, low-wage workers, Indigenous populations, the poor, immigrants, and women. This dual state, we argue, did undergo changes to adopt more procedurally liberal, professional, overtly deracialized legal forms after World War II, but these changes masked more than tamed the continuing illiberal, authoritarian violence that targeted marginalized citizens. While constantly changing, the American legal system is best understood not as a singular liberal order but instead as a hybrid system of mutually constitutive liberal and illiberal and authoritarian legal practices.
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 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 | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.052 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".