Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since early in my academic career, I have been fascinated by the common law’s concepts of fiduciary obligations and fiduciary relationships. How can we make sense of the idea that people are legally obliged to make decisions in the pursuit of the interests of other people? The basic elements of private law—contract, tort, and restitution—know nothing of this. Like many others, I was struck—‘haunted’ might be a better word—by the observation of a chief justice of Australia that ‘[t]he fiduciary relationship is a concept in search of a principle’.1 That can be read as a warning; I took it as a challenge. This book is my response. By 2000, I had become a comparative lawyer, thanks in no small part to Peter Birks and Michele Graziadei. I had begun to see in the civil law tradition a kind of parallel universe, a very different way of comprehending the realities I had hitherto known only through the concepts of the common law. When I came that year to McGill University, I continued teaching trust law and corporate law, a combination which already gives multiple perspectives on fiduciary relationships; but I also began to study and teach the civil law, which has its own language and concepts for the very same issues and problems. Not only does today’s Civil Code of Québec regulate carefully the administration of the property of others, but without looking too hard one can find, in the texts preserved in the Digest of Justinian, rules against unauthorized profits and against exercising powers held for others while in a conflict of interest. And so the challenge widened into one that at McGill might be called ‘transsystemic’. It became wider still as I became aware of a growing literature and case law exploring the question whether public powers can be understood as governed by principles that are similar to those that govern private powers held for others.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.632 | 0.459 |
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".