AI-generated conjecture · below the evidence/publication boundary

The jurists' PageRank

Status: Prior

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).

This is a proposed connection between two domains, generated by a language model. It is not an article and not evidence: it sits below the evidence/publication boundary. A quantitative prediction and a named kill-dataset are attached (when registered) so the claim stays falsifiable rather than merely evocative.

Claim (verbatim)

The jurists' PageRank. Joins eigenvector centrality to Roman jurisprudence: the Law of Citations of 426 CE, which privileged five jurists, mostly legislated what network centrality would compute from the jurists' own cross-citations, with Gaius as the deliberate, measurable exception 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.

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

Adjacent (closely related prior work exists)

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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