RESEARCH ARTICLE: “The Sea Being Without the Common Law”: The Civil Law Tradition, the Law of Nations, and Maritime Jurisdiction in British Newfoundland to 1849
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Historians’ traditional assumption that British Newfoundland’s legal history is best explained through the lens of English common law fails to account for English and Anglo-American historic legal pluralism, leaving the civil law’s role in colonial state formation altogether unexplored. In medieval, early modern, and late modern England, the civil law, based on Roman law rather than the “common” law of municipal courts, was the law of international, maritime, commercial, and military matters. When “English Newfoundland” emerged from a multinational, mixed society of settlers and fishers, asserting the Crown’s jurisdiction both on land and at sea, over foreign nationals as well as British subjects became essential — as the Piracy Acts, the Navigation Acts, local reforms, and international treaties increased the importance of British maritime jurisdiction. Until the constitutional crisis of 1789–93, apparent shifts toward a “common-law system” tended to increase civil-law courts’ jurisdictions and personnel. While the Court of Vice-Admiralty in St. John’s was abolished in 1824, the civil law survived in the Supreme Court’s “admiralty” jurisdiction — belying that tradition’s earlier importance. This article explores the rise and fall of the civil law in British Newfoundland to the repeal of the Navigation Acts in 1849.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".