'Forms Liberate': Reclaiming the Legal Philosophy of Lon L. Fuller
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis offers a reading of the legal philosophy of the mid-twentieth century legal scholar, Lon L. Fuller. By illuminating how Fuller’s vision of law gravitates constantly to the relationship between the form of law and the status of the legal subject as an agent, this reading provides a basis for revisiting the issues in dispute in his famous exchanges with the legal positivist philosopher, H.L.A. Hart. The thesis as a whole seeks to meet two main objectives. First, I seek to demonstrate how Fuller’s persistent concern for the way that the form of law instantiates respect for the legal subject lends his legal philosophy a coherence that has been insufficiently appreciated to this point. Second, I seek to elaborate the claim that once we appreciate the centrality of the relationship between legal form and agency to Fuller’s thought, we come to understand why he insisted that law can and should be distinguished from other modes of ordering, and why it must also be regarded as distinctively moral.
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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".