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The classroom trails the courtroom
Status is derived only from the shepherd-authored triage/prediction data above -- community submissions and claims are a separate overlay and can never change it (see the participation panel below).
“Anticipated in print” means the direction of this claim already appears in scholarship, while this exact test has never been run — it records prior art, not proof; nothing here counts as supported or falsified until a registered resolution says so.
Claim (verbatim)
Trainee scribes copied model contracts — fictional sales, loans, adoptions with dummy names — and these school pieces are usually mined as evidence of contemporary law. Every modern student knows a rival truth: textbooks trail practice, because teachers teach the forms they themselves learned a career ago. The conjecture: the mix of contract types in school exercises statistically matches the real documentary mix of the previous generation, roughly 40 to 70 years earlier, not the current one. If it holds, the mismatches between school law and archival practice that scholars explain away become timestamps — a pedagogical lag constant — and any undated school assemblage can be dated by which decade's legal economy its homework mirrors.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
The genre distribution of model contracts in the major Old Babylonian school assemblages (Nippur, Ur) will fit the genre distribution of real contracts drafted 40-70 years earlier better (lower Kullback-Leibler divergence or chi-square) than the distribution of contemporaneous contracts. Primary clause, which decides the verdict: the lagged fit beats the contemporaneous fit in at least two of the three largest independently dated school assemblages. Secondary clause: the best-fit lag falls between 30 and 80 years in every assemblage where it beats the contemporaneous fit.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Archibab (dated real contracts by genre) crossed with CDLI catalogues of Old Babylonian school model contracts.
In the kill-dataset registry:
Nobody has run this test. The kill-data is named above. If you can run it — or you know the paper that already settles it — claim the kill or submit the prior scholarship. Kills and prior scholarship are credited here, by name, as they come in.
On Inferpedia
This conjecture is linked to the following pages on Inferpedia, an encyclopedia of the missing — working atlas pages, some still early scaffolding.
Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Composed blind by claude-fable-5 from internal knowledge only, with zero tool calls, and emitted directly as a single JSON text message.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
Searched model contracts vs. real practice. The OBMC project and Spada's editions document systematic divergences between school model contracts and archival contracts (omitted witnesses/dates, phraseology absent from real documents), but the generational-lag hypothesis (school genre mix matching the previous generation's documentary mix) was not located.
Predictions
No prediction registered yet.
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