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The jurists' PageRank
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Claim (verbatim)
The jurists' PageRank. Joins eigenvector centrality — the recursive logic behind Google's PageRank, in which authority flows to those cited by the authoritative — to Roman jurisprudence. The Law of Citations of 426 CE decreed that courts follow five jurists — Papinian, Ulpian, Paulus, Modestinus, and Gaius — with Papinian breaking ties. The claim is that the statute mostly ratified a ranking the jurists' own literature had already computed: because Roman jurists cited one another constantly, running PageRank on the citation graph recoverable from the Digest should place four of the five at the very top of the cited jurists, with Papinian's centrality matching his statutory tie-breaker role. The measurable exception is Gaius — barely cited by his peers but beloved of the law schools — who should rank far down the citation ordering, quantifying the law as roughly four-fifths network-following and one-fifth pedagogical intervention smuggled in from the classroom.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Building the jurist-cites-jurist digraph from the Digest's inscriptiones and internal citations, PageRank places Papinian, Ulpian, Paulus, and Modestinus in the top 8 of the roughly 40 cited jurists (probability under random ranking below 10^-3), with Papinian in the top 2, matching his statutory tie-breaker role; Gaius, though legislated into the five, ranks below 10th by citations received, quantifying the law as roughly four-fifths network-following and one-fifth pedagogical intervention.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: a citation graph extracted from a digitized Digest (ROMTEXT/Amanuensis). Two or more of the four core jurists falling outside the top 8, or Gaius ranking top 5 by incoming citations, kills it.
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. Kills and priors are credited here, by name, as they come in.
In the atlas
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Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Generated by a fresh Fable-tier instance at maximum effort with generation-first blindness (no repo reads, no searches, no DB queries); title list supplied at launch, titles only, no verdicts or dossiers seen; prompt pre-committed in docs/GOAL_CONJECTURES_BATCH2_20260705.md (7e55eb8). Novelty unverified by construction.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
A relational database of the Digest's citation apparatus exists (JOHD) — quantitative treatment of the exact corpus, used so far for corpus linguistics rather than centrality — and PageRank on legal-citation networks is standard in modern law. Building the jurist-cites-jurist digraph and ranking against the Law of Citations' five was not located.
- 'A Relational Database of Roman Law Based on Justinian's Digest', JOHD — The enabling dataset on the exact corpus
Predictions
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