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Record W7165112071 · doi:10.3138/utlj-2025-0024

Theology in <i>Vincent v Lake Erie</i>

2025· article· en· W7165112071 on OpenAlexaffvenue
Ernest J. Weinrib

Bibliographic record

VenueUniversity of Toronto Law Journal · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicLegal principles and applications
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Toronto
Fundersnot available
KeywordsPossession (linguistics)Relevance (law)DamagesProperty (philosophy)Private propertyEconomic JusticeNatural lawProperty rightsObligationCompensation (psychology)

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The famous US case of Vincent v Lake Erie refers to the view of theologians that ‘a starving man may, without moral guilt, take what is necessary to sustain life, but it could hardly be said that the obligation would not be upon such a person to pay the value of the property so taken when he becomes able to do so.’ In fact, this view was controversial among scholastic thinkers of the medieval and early modern period. This lecture outlines this controversy by considering the three apparently inconsistent ideas pertinent to the late medieval conception of private property: common possession in the Garden of Eden, the postlapsarian institution of private property, and the use of another’s property in circumstances of extreme necessity. At the heart of this triad of ideas is the distinction between negating and limiting the original natural right to common possession. The lecture suggests that the modern notion of proportionality provides a conceptual and sequential framework for understanding the relationship between these three ideas. Scholastic thinkers differed on whether necessitous use was a matter of justice that went to the operation of rights as they evolved from the Garden of Eden (in which case, compensation was due for damages done by the use) or a matter of charity (in which case, compensation was not due). In its treatment of the three ideas, the scholastic literature attests to the relevance of sequential reasoning in law and especially to the importance of distinguishing between the scope and the operation of a right. A cause of the continuing perplexity about Vincent is the inattention to the sequential nature of the reasoning needed to resolve it.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: Other
Teacher disagreement score0.079
Threshold uncertainty score0.157

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0060.009
Scholarly communication0.0060.004
Open science0.0010.003
Research integrity0.0040.006
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0050.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.008
GPT teacher head0.254
Teacher spread0.247 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreOther

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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