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.
Contestability
PartialClaimed · partialDefinition · Philip Pettit, On the People's Terms (2012)
Anyone subject to a decision must have a real route to challenge it — to inspect the grounds it was made on, to contest the outcome, and to have that challenge answered. Legitimacy is not settled once by an election or an act of consent; it is held open by that route staying available. The test of a free system is not that its rulers are kind, but that their decisions can be contested by the people they affect.
Analysis
A route exists and runs, which is more than the rest of this cell manages: FLARE-AI takes one submission and pushes it to several developers and registries, and the AI Incident Database has archived more than 1,000 reports. What it is not is a route for the person a decision fell on. Reports come from researchers who found the flaw, the grounds on which a system acted appear nowhere in the file, and no recipient owes an answer, so remediation is something the papers hope to accelerate rather than something anyone can demand.
Non-domination
PartialClaimed · partialDefinition · Philip Pettit, Republicanism (1997)
Freedom here is not the absence of interference. You are unfree if someone holds unchecked power over you — even if they never misuse it and mean well. A benevolent master is still a master, and so is an authority whose workings you cannot see. Legitimacy requires that power be checked, not merely well-intentioned.
Analysis
The strongest republican element here is the legal safe harbour, a protection for the reporter that would not depend on the reported firm's forbearance, which is the structural rather than dispositional check Pettit demands. Wei and Heim go further and treat enforcement and mandatory channels as design choices a national regime must settle. Those are precisely the parts not in force, and the safe harbour is asked of legislators and providers rather than supplied by anyone here. What actually runs is voluntary on both sides, so a developer that ignores every report filed against it breaks nothing.
Public decision record
PartialClaimed · partialDefinition · Common-law practice
Rulings on challenges are written down, published and citable, so the system's interpretation of its own rules accumulates in the open, where it can be studied, invoked and criticized. The record is what makes the system predictable as well as legitimate: nothing is settled in private, and every decision leaves its reasoning behind it.
Analysis
The AI Incident Database is archived and searchable by outsiders, and the 750-plus incidents reviewed four years later show it accumulating as intended. What accumulates is harms rather than holdings. No one rules on a report, so nothing is settled by it, and no entry can be cited as authority for how a developer's own published rules should be read; the editors' own conclusion is that cause, extent of harm and severity frequently cannot be pinned down at all.