A common law power to dissect: a medico-legal history
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Some jurists claimed there was a common law power to dissect the human body prior to and outside of the Anatomy Act 1832. That power formed part of the privileges of physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries, and, accordingly, the common law to the extent it recognized those privileges. It is best evidenced in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries-most authoritatively by the Court of Queen's Bench in R v Price in 1884, the Québec Superior Court in Phillips v Montreal General Hospital in 1908, and the reasons of the inquiry into the conduct Dr William Ramsay Smith in 1903, but also in the comments of writers in law manuals until the mid-twentieth century. The existence of a common law power to dissect challenges narratives ordinarily told about the history of anatomy law specifically and the law of the dead generally. The power may also still exist if legislation in a jurisdiction has not displaced or substantially altered it. Through medico-legal history, the author argues that the medical lawyer can benefit from re-examining old doctrines. Heterodox elements in old doctrines suggest alternative possibilities for the law, allowing medical law's histories to be retold.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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 it