{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.017777777777777778, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0, 'mean_word_length': 4.925438596491228, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Larger Than Life

In law, as in art, things often appear larger than life. This same trompe-l'oeil can infect the historiography of these apparently unrelated disciplines. For there are schools in both the history of art and legal history that insist on divorcing their principal subject matter from social fact on the strength of the idea that art or law, as the case may be, is best understood within the confines of a closed intellectual tradition. Thus, a sizeable body of scholars depicts the history of painting as turning on its own dime—there is nothing much wrong in writing, say, the history of the Group of Seven without much reference to the broader context of ideas and life experiences in which the Canadian art movement took shape. This is a well-established tradition in Canadian legal historiography too: law library shelves are cluttered with histories of codes and constitutions that pay lip service to the festivals and fighting that took place around them or, perhaps worse still, that are accompanied by potted social histories that trivialize the importance of everyone except the lawyers. Historians have denounced positivism in both art history and legal history, but the method continues to flourish, Cult. Studies notwithstanding. There is certainly a place for internal art history and internal legal history, but only for