“The Quality of Mercy is not Strain’d”: Ideological and Repressive Modes of Juvenile Justice—A Comparison between Paris and Boston in the Mid-Twentieth Century
Bibliographic record
Abstract
“The quality of mercy is not strain’d, It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven”. This quotation from William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice was still used in the 1950s as the motto of the Boston Juvenile Court. It tended to replace the traditional repressive function of the Law by an ideological function expressed by Love. The ideology of compassion and child’s interest, modernized and more or less dechristianized, ensured the smooth running of juvenile courts; it was combined with a certain dose of violence varying from one country to another. While comparative history has been supplemented for several years by studies on Europe and Canada, almost nothing exists on the relationship between France and the United States. Thanks to newly discovered court records, it is possible to address the history of this novel form of justice, which was defined as “neohumanist” by the French juvenile judge Jean Chazal in 1952, and which achieved worldwide success in the twentieth century. Given the magnitude of the task, the focus will be on the comparison of two dynamic and pioneering juvenile courts, Boston and Paris, during the 1940s and 1950s. The article will successively analyze legal frameworks, populations targeted and judges’ decisions, indicative of new ways of thinking and of controlling.
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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".