Statutory Interpretation: Pragmatics and Argumentation by Douglas Walton, Fabrizio Macagno and Giovanni Sartor
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Statutory Interpretation is a comprehensive and nuanced account of some of the most fundamental features of the law: legal reasoning and interpretation. The book draws on philosophy, argumentative theory, linguistics, artificial intelligence, and dialectics to develop a robust theory of argumentation and pragmatics both in and outside of the law. The work is written by Douglas Walton, former Distinguished Research Fellow at the University of Windsor’s Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation and Rhetoric; Fabrizio Macagno, professor at Universidade NOVA de Lisboa; and Giovanni Sartor, professor at the University of Bologna. This work represents a balance, most of all, of theoretical and practical understandings of statutory interpretation. It makes inroads into some of the most challenging abstract aspects of statutory interpretation, yet grounds itself in a space where applicability and practicality are the text’s raison d’être. Readers will come away from this book with a keen understanding of how they can interpret the law and, more importantly, how they can justify the frameworks guiding these interpretations.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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".