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.
Prescription
PartialClaimed · partialDefinition · Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
Long usage itself confers authority: a practice that has organized life for generations carries compressed, tested wisdom, even when nobody can articulate its justification.
Analysis
The theory's core mechanism is Burke's, restated: an actor completes an inherited pattern — what does someone like me do in a situation like this — without being able to articulate why, and the pattern works because it has been shaped by long use. What is deliberately withheld is Burke's normative step. The account explains why unarticulated standards are sticky; it never says that stickiness earns them deference, and it insists their content is arbitrary.
The unwritten constitution
PresentClaimed · deliveredDefinition · A. V. Dicey, Law of the Constitution (1885)
Some of a country's most binding norms are never written anywhere — the UK's constitutional conventions bind governments without a single codified sentence. Binding and codified are different properties.
Analysis
This is the whole subject: standards that bind behavior, are backed by social sanction, vary by context and are written down nowhere. Dicey's distinction between binding and codified is the theory's organizing claim rather than an implication of it.
Organic amendment
PartialClaimed · partialDefinition · Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
Norms change from within a community's practice — gradually, by adjustment — not by decree from outside. The community is the author of its own drift.
Analysis
Dynamism is one of the five features the theory sets out to explain, and it locates change inside the practice: standards shift as the patterns people complete shift, with no decree from outside. Burke's other half is missing — there is no community authoring its own drift here, only a population whose distribution moves. Change is endogenous but unowned.