Book Review: Essays in the History of Canadian Law, Volume VIII: in Honour of R. C. B. Risk, by G. Blaine Baker and Jim Phillips (eds)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Dick Risk is one of the pioneers in the study of English Canadian legal history and this book represents a well-deserved tribute.In the 1970's, Risk, along with a few others, invigorated what had been a dormant field of legal scholarship.The "few others" include Graham Parker and Murray Greenwood, both of whom died late last year.They were important mentors of mine and will be missed by many Canadian legal historians.Together with Risk, they have been generous with their encouragement, nurturing a younger generation of scholars.The scholarly importance of legal history was not always recognized.Indeed, it was marginalized for much of the twentieth century for reasons Parker perhaps best expressed in 1974.The existing legal historical scholarship, consisting largely of medievalist work on the origins of common law and whiggish, or nineteenth century style constitutional history, had little appeal in the modem legal academy concerned about professional training or for the more critically-oriented legal realists.Although the field might be more effectively pursued in the humanities than in a law school, Parker noted that historians seemed to have little interest in law. 2 Risk wrote rather less pessimistically about the field at about the same time, charting a prospectus for its study and identifying issues that would interest the wider scholarly community.'I [hereinafter Essayvs in HoanouroqfRisk], 2 G. Parker, "The Masochism of the Legal Historian" (1974) 24 UT.L.J. 279. 3
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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 | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.017 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.049 | 0.017 |
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".