Taxonomy / Consociational codification / Law as an objective the model cannot override

Law as an objective the model cannot override

The rules the system obeys are not written by the lab but taken from a named body of actual law, and obeying them is placed above every other goal the system has, so no ordinary objective can trade the law away. The supporting work argues the legal side of that design: the law already recognizes actors that carry duties without being persons, so an agent can be made a duty-bearer and liability can be channeled back to whoever deployed it. The strategy is entirely about where the rules come from and that they win; it says nothing about what happens when two of those rules collide.

The method, against Consociational codification

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Concept Analysis: Theoretical Foundations

Each concept is read twice: whether the approach carries it, and whether the approach's own sources claim it. A concept that is absent and was never claimed is a gap in the field rather than a failure of the work, and is marked out of scope.

Segmental autonomy

PartialClaimed · partial

Definition · Arend Lijphart, Democracy in Plural Societies (1977)

In a deeply divided society, each group governs its own internal affairs — its schools, its family law — within its own sphere, instead of everyone living under one uniform rule.

Analysis

Different jurisdictions' laws genuinely differ, so users in different places would live under genuinely different rules — autonomy by inheritance. But the segments are geographic borders, because that is how law comes packaged — not because they match actual communities of value.

Choice-of-law rule

PartialClaimed · partial

Definition · Friedrich Carl von Savigny, System of the Modern Roman Law (1849)

When several bodies of rules could govern the same case, an explicit rule decides which one actually does — and states the reason. Without such a rule, "different rules for different groups" has no answer for the cases in between.

Analysis

Named but not built: the survey recognizes that real law brings its own which-law-applies rules, but no one has implemented the arbiter that would actually decide, for a given user and query, whose law governs — with the reason stated. The tradition's central mechanism is present on paper and absent in practice.

Mutual veto and proportionality

AbsentNot claimed · out of scope

Definition · Arend Lijphart, Democracy in Plural Societies (1977)

Decisions that affect all groups require every group's consent, and representation is proportional to each group's size — so no segment can simply be outvoted on what matters most to it.

Analysis

Nothing gives any group a veto or a proportional voice. Law is treated as content to comply with, not as a settlement among groups.

Concept Analysis: Newly Introduced

Law as ready-made content

Added

The approach adds something the tradition does not discuss: outsourcing the rulebook to institutions that already have democratic legitimacy — legislatures and courts. That neatly sidesteps "who elected the lab?", at the price of inheriting law's gaps: much of what a model does has no law on point.

Papers

No method has been built here yet — this approach rests entirely on what follows.