Plain Language Guide

When the Architecture of Law Predicts Its Outcomes

A layperson's guide to the SOoL structural jurimetrics study — no legal or technical background required

13

Contradiction Types

Weights were fixed before any data was collected, so the coding scheme could not be tuned to fit the corpus.

14.0×

CD Ratio (Denied / Granted) · v2 only

Computed live from the v2 rows only, so it no longer blends annotation regimes. A value below 1.0 means granted cases carry more contradiction debt than denied ones — the reverse of the v1 figure, which was produced by a rule that forced debt onto losses. The v2 re-annotation is complete, so this value is stable. It is not a predictive claim.

5,103

Federal Appellate Cases

8

Doctrinal Domains

"An architect asks whether the building is beautiful. A structural engineer asks whether it will stand. SOoL is the structural engineering approach applied to law."

The Core Idea: Structural Soundness vs. Doctrinal Beauty

Standard legal analysis asks: does the rule apply to these facts? SOoL asks something more fundamental: is the architecture of this legal claim structurally sound? A claim can have excellent facts and strong doctrine and still fail — if the structure holding it together is broken.

The Eight-Step Structural Checklist (The MLC)

MLC stands for Minimum Legal Chain — the minimal sequence of eight conditions that must all be satisfied for a legal claim to be structurally complete. Think of it as eight load-bearing walls. If any wall is missing or cracked, the structure is at risk.

N1 — Source of Authority

Is there a legitimate legal source — a statute, constitutional provision, or binding precedent — that authorizes this rule?

N2 — Norm

Is there a determinate, intelligible rule that specifies what conduct is required, permitted, or prohibited?

N3 — Actor in Role

Is there an identifiable person bearing a specific legal role — employee, officer, regulated entity — to whom the rule applies?

N4 — Triggering Facts

Are the facts that activate the rule actually present and accurately established? Fabricated or suppressed facts fail here.

N5 — Legal Act or Omission

Did the relevant conduct actually occur? Courts often disagree about whether particular behavior counts as the legally relevant act.

N6 — Target

Is there an identifiable party against whom the obligation runs, and do they have legal standing to be in the case?

N7 — Legal Effect ★ PIVOTAL

Does the right, duty, or legal consequence actually attach? This is where most claims ultimately succeed or fail — the recognition gateway.

N8 — Remedy

Is there an available remedy if the obligation is breached? A right without a remedy is structurally incomplete. In the current corpus, N8 failure following N7 failure is imposed by annotation rule rather than observed.

Contradiction Debt (`cd_case`): The Structural Stress Score

CD stands for Contradiction Debt — a single number that measures how structurally stressed a legal claim is. It is calculated by identifying which structural failure modes are active in the case and adding up their assigned weights. A CD of zero means the legal architecture is sound. The higher the CD, the more structural stress.

Which quantity is being reported

Three different measures have circulated under the single name “CD”. They are not interchangeable, and mixing them has produced published figures that cannot be compared. Each is now named explicitly wherever it appears.

`cd_case`	A weighted flow. The sum of the `sool:cdWeight` values of the contradiction types active in one case. Ceiling 1.52 under weight profile `core-v1`; observed mean 0.1375, observed maximum 0.7800. Every contradiction-debt figure on this page is `cd_case`.
`ct_count`	An unweighted count. How many of the 13 contradiction types are active in a case (0–13), ignoring weights. Corpus mean 1.41; 25.7% of cases carry none. The banded scale on the printed Quick Reference card (0 / 1–2 / 3–4 / 5–6 / 7+) is a `ct_count` scale — it was never a `cd_case` scale, and reading it as one puts all 5,103 cases in band “0”.
`cd_stock`	An accumulated stock. Debt carried by an institution over time, clamped to [0, 1], used by the SimLex simulator to trigger regime shifts. It is an accumulation of `cd_case` increments, not a `cd_case` value. No figure on this page is a `cd_stock`.

Because cd_case is a per-adjudication flow and cd_stock is an institutional accumulation, the corpus mean (0.1375) cannot be read against SimLex's incoherence thresholds (0.32–0.56) — those are thresholds on cd_stock. Establishing that bridge is open work, not a published result.

An important limitation. CD is not an independent predictor of case outcomes, and earlier versions of this page wrongly claimed that it was. In the current pipeline the recognition and repair nodes (N7, N8) are derived from the court's disposition by an annotation rule, and the reported outcome variable is derived from those same nodes. Any strong association between CD and outcome is therefore true by construction.

The corpus makes this visible. Restricting CD to the upstream nodes (N1–N6) — the part of the chain not touched by the derivation rule — separates outcomes at AUC = 0.5518, near chance. The same collapse shows up in the raw means:

Measure	Denied	Granted	Ratio
Full CD (includes N7/N8)	0.254	0.020	13.0×
CD restricted to N1–N6	0.019	0.014	1.4×

About 88% of all Contradiction Debt in this corpus comes from the two nodes derived from the disposition. Remove them and the headline separation falls from 13× to 1.4×. This is reported as a limitation, not as evidence against circularity — the cd_upstream field is now published alongside contradiction_debt so the check is reproducible.

Superseded — recomputation complete (SOoL v2.0.0, 6 August 2026). Every figure in this box was computed under the v1 annotation regime, in which an annotation rule forced Recognition Failure (RF) wherever Node 7 failed. That rule was the direct cause of the concentration described above: RF and RPF fired on roughly 64% of cases, and both attach to N7/N8. The rule has been removed and the entire corpus has been re‑annotated under v2. On the completed corpus RF falls from 64% to 3.0%, and the share of contradiction debt contributed by N7/N8 falls from about 77% to 27.1% — so the 13.0×, 1.4× and 88% figures above do not survive. The CD gap does not merely shrink, it reverses direction: granted cases carry marginally more debt than denied ones (0.145 vs 0.126, a ratio of 0.87). The superseded figures are left visible rather than deleted so the correction stays auditable. The replacement figures are published: see the Hypotheses tab, where P3 reports the reversed CD ordering and P8 reports that the debt weights add no discriminative power over a raw contradiction count.

cd_case STABILITY SCALE

0.00 — Stable (clean chain) 0.15 — Stressed 0.30 — Unstable 0.45+ — Collapse risk

0.013

Mean CD — Protection Granted (n=1,027)

0.257

Mean CD — Protection Denied (n=3,265)

What This Corpus Can and Cannot Show

This section previously reported four "independent validation tests" of CD's predictive power. They have been withdrawn. None of the four was independent of the annotation rule that derives the outcome variable from the node closures, so all four measured the same circularity rather than testing it.

SUPPORTED

That an eight-node chain can be applied consistently across eight doctrinal domains by independent annotation passes; that failures concentrate at identifiable nodes; and that those concentration patterns differ by domain in ways the coding scheme did not anticipate.

NOT SUPPORTED

That CD predicts how a court will rule. Establishing that requires comparing CD against the court's recorded disposition, coded independently of the node closures. That work is in progress; until it lands, no predictive claim should be drawn from this corpus.

Where Law Fails: One Shared Profile, Different Stress Points

Superseded — fully refuted 6 August 2026

This section previously reported three failure clusters, assigning each domain a distinct primary failure node: N2 for Contract and Family Law, N5 for First Amendment, Employment and §1983, N6 for Administrative Law, Immigration and Criminal Procedure. With the corpus complete, all three have now been tested and none survives.

N5 in its three assigned domains runs 8.8% against 8.5% elsewhere (p = 0.20); N6 runs 2.7% against 3.0% (p = 0.40). The N2 cluster could not be tested in August because Contract and Family Law had not been rebuilt; they now have been, and it fails too — Norm Indeterminacy fires in 59.7% of those two domains against 54.2% elsewhere, a ratio of 1.10. Statistically detectable on 5,103 analysed cases, but nowhere near a cluster, and Node 2 is not the most-failed node in a single domain. Node 7 is, in all eight. The accompanying bar chart displayed hard-coded v1 odds ratios and now computes live from v2 rows.

What the rebuilt data show instead is a shared failure profile — every domain breaks at the same place, in the same order — with domains distinguished not by where the chain fails but by which kind of contradiction shows up there. The chart below plots failure rates at the three formerly-claimed cluster nodes alongside Node 7; the flat N2/N5/N6 series against a uniformly high N7 series is the point.

D1 FIRST AMENDMENT — ROLE CONTRADICTION

RC3 in 25.3% of cases · 3.6× the rate elsewhere

The speaker holds two roles at once — public employee and citizen — and the same act of speech produces opposite legal effects through each. Garcetti v. Ceballos is the paradigm. The chain does not fail because the norm is unclear; it fails because the actor is two people at the same moment.

D3 ADMINISTRATIVE LAW — AUTHORITY INFLATION

AI in 14.1% of cases · 5.4× the rate elsewhere

The sharpest domain signal in the corpus. Authority Inflation fires at N1→N2: the decision-maker's will displaces the governing norm — the agency substitutes its own preference for the rule it was empowered to apply. Administrative law is where that substitution is most visible, even though it is not where the chain finally breaks.

Correction, 6 August 2026. This panel previously labelled AI “Authority Incompleteness” and glossed it as incomplete delegation. That was wrong. Both the ontology of record and the annotation prompt define AI as Authority Inflation — close to the inverse claim. The 14.7% measurement is unaffected, because the annotator worked from the correct definition; it was the reading published here that did not match what was measured.

D6 CIVIL RIGHTS §1983 — CORRELATIVITY

CC in 30.7% of cases · 1.8× the rate elsewhere

The qualified-immunity shape: the court assumes or acknowledges the violation and still bars liability. The right is recognised; the correlative duty is refused. Under v1 this pattern was absorbed into Recognition Failure and recorded just 3 times corpus-wide — it is visible only now that the forcing rule is gone.

D8 FAMILY LAW — JURISDICTIONAL CONTRADICTION

JC in 38.4% of cases · 1.7× the rate elsewhere

New with the completed corpus. Two authority sources issue competing norms over the same conduct — state against state under the UCCJEA, state against federal, tribal against both. Family law is where a claimant is most often governed by two systems at once. It also carries the corpus's highest mean contradiction debt (0.176), consistent with a domain in which the governing authority is itself contested.

D7 CONTRACT — NO SIGNATURE

Contract is the one domain with no contradiction type elevated at all (nothing above 1.2× at p < 10⁻⁴; Norm Indeterminacy runs 55.0% against 55.5% elsewhere, a ratio of 0.99). Employment Discrimination, Criminal Procedure and Immigration are likewise unmarked. That is a finding rather than a null: if every domain carried a signature, "domain-invariant architecture" would be doing no work. Half the corpus sits on the shared baseline with nothing distinctive, which is what the invariance claim predicts.

Domains 2, 4 and 5 (Employment, Criminal Procedure, Immigration) show no contradiction type elevated at a comparable margin; their profiles sit close to the corpus baseline. Note that RC3, CC and NI are rule-forced types — the annotation prompt compels them under stated conditions — so these rates measure how often those conditions obtain, not an unprompted discovery. Domains 1–8 all receive an identical prompt, which is what makes the comparison across them legitimate.

What This Means for Lawyers, Theorists, and Students

⚖ For Practitioners

The MLC gives a vocabulary for describing where a claim breaks down — which link in the chain carries the defect, rather than a global impression that a case is weak. It is a descriptive and diagnostic tool. It is not a predictive one, and nothing here should be used to price settlement risk or forecast how a court will rule.

📚 For Theorists

This corpus offers a structural vocabulary for comparing failure patterns across doctrinal areas that are usually studied in isolation. It takes no position on legal realism. An earlier version of this page claimed the data challenged realism by showing structure outpredicts judicial ideology; that claim rested on a circular outcome variable and has been withdrawn. Adjudicating it would require a predictive test against recorded dispositions, which has not yet been run.

🎓 For Students

IRAC tells you what the law says. The MLC tells you whether the structure holding the argument together is sound. You will spend your legal career applying rules — understanding the structural architecture beneath those rules makes you a better analyst of why some arguments win and others lose.

Why the Weights Are What They Are

Every structural failure mode carries a weight that determines how much it contributes to the Contradiction Debt score. These weights were assigned from first principles before any data was collected — they were not calibrated to predict outcomes. They reflect three theoretical criteria: how fundamentally the failure violates the BFO-typed constraint it targets; how far down the chain the failure occurs and how irreversible it is; and how difficult the structural problem is to repair without external intervention.

The weights range from 0.07 to 0.18 — a ratio of 2.57:1 between the lowest and highest. This spread is deliberate: narrow enough that all thirteen types remain informative, wide enough to reflect genuine theoretical differences in severity.

CODE WEIGHT NAME & PLAIN-LANGUAGE RATIONALE NODE

RCL 0.18 Recognition Collapse — the most severe violation N6→N8

The highest weight because RCL destroys the symmetry of the legal relationship itself. The agent loses the capacity to hold rights while retaining the capacity to bear obligations — the same person is simultaneously unable to assert protections and can still be held to duties. This violates the fundamental Hohfeldian principle that rights and correlative duties must exist together. No other failure type destroys this ontological symmetry so completely. It also carries the heaviest repair burden: restoring someone's legal subjecthood requires institutional reconstitution, not just doctrinal clarification. Paradigm: an immigrant in removal proceedings who is regulated as an object of enforcement but cannot assert rights against removal.

CF 0.15 Conferral Failure — the chain has no foundation N1→N3

The second highest because it fails at the very first link of the chain and does so irreversibly within the proceeding. If the authority source failed to properly vest the actor in the required role, there is no legitimate actor — the entire subsequent structure has no bearer. You cannot fix this by clarifying the norm or reassessing the facts. The chain simply has no foundation. In patent law, this fires when the patent is found invalid: the USPTO failed to properly confer the right, so the authority source at Node 1 never properly existed. High repair burden, earliest possible chain position, complete structural void.

RC3 0.14 Role Contradiction — incompatible obligations for the same act N3

The same agent bears two roles whose obligations are genuinely incompatible for the same act — not merely difficult to reconcile, but structurally irreconcilable. The structural problem is not vagueness but genuine incompatibility: no amount of normative clarification resolves it. The only structural resolution is role recharacterization, which typically requires a new legal framework rather than better application of the existing one. Garcetti v. Ceballos is the paradigm: Richard Ceballos simultaneously holds the citizen-speaker role (whose speech is protected) and the official-duty public employee role (whose work product is not) for the exact same memo. No interpretation of the Pickering/Garcetti framework can honor both roles for the same act. This is why RC3 is common in First Amendment corpus cases — the structural problem is endemic to the doctrinal architecture. (Frequency revised: 19.5% was measured under the v1 regime; with First Amendment now fully rebuilt under v2 it stands at 25.2% — higher than either earlier figure, and 4.1× the rate across the other rebuilt domains, making it the second-strongest domain signal in the corpus. Note RC3 is rule-forced: annotation RULE 2 compels it wherever two roles produce incompatible effects from one act, so this measures how often that configuration arises rather than an unprompted discovery. The rebuild is complete — see the notice at the top of this page.)

CC 0.14 Correlativity Contradiction — right acknowledged, duty refused N7

Matches RC3 because both sever a Hohfeldian correlation, but CC does it at Node 7: the court acknowledges the right exists and was violated, then refuses to enforce the correlative duty through immunity or structural bar. The court is effectively saying: your right was violated, and the person who violated it faces no obligation to answer for it. This is ontologically impossible in a coherent legal system — a right without a correlative duty is not a right in any meaningful sense. The qualified immunity doctrine in civil rights cases is the paradigm: "Assuming a constitutional violation occurred, the right was not clearly established, so the officer is immune." Right acknowledged; duty refused. The 0.14 weight reflects that this is a recognized structural contradiction built directly into doctrine — not an accident but a deliberate structural choice with serious ontological consequences.

RPF 0.13 Repair Failure — remedy structurally blocked N8

High weight but below CF and RCL because, under the v1 annotation rules, RPF almost always cascaded from Recognition Failure rather than firing independently. When Node 7 failed (right not recognized), Node 8 was stipulated to fail too — the claimant has no recognized right to repair. This cascade was imposed by annotation RULE 1, not discovered: the measured phi of 0.953 records rule compliance, not an empirical regularity. The rule has since been removed. Across the completed corpus, RPF no longer cascades from Node 7 and fires in 5.6% of cases rather than 64%; measured freely the Node 7/Node 8 association falls from 0.953 to 0.75, with the two nodes diverging in 13.9% of cases. That residual coupling is not symmetric, and the asymmetry is the interesting part: remedy failure almost always implies effect failure (98.9%), while effect failure leaves a remedy intact in roughly a fifth of cases. The 0.953 figure is a v1 artifact retained here only to document what the rule did. The passage below, on RPF firing independently, describes what v2 is now measuring directly. The weight is set high enough to reflect that blocked repair is genuinely serious, while acknowledging the cascade nature of most RPF findings. The important exceptions — where RPF fires independently — are the most structurally interesting cases: habeas corpus (the entire proceeding challenges prior repair adequacy), FRAND patent licensing (the remedy pathway is explicitly blocked by licensing obligations), and some qualified immunity cases where relief is theoretically available but procedurally inaccessible.

AI 0.12 Authority Inflation — personal will displaces the norm N1→N2

Higher than NI and JC because AI is not a problem of vagueness or competing norms — it is a displacement of the institutional norm by personal will. When a decision-maker's preferences substitute for the governing rule, the chain loses its institutional grounding at the N1→N2 link. The authority source continues to exist formally, but the norm it issues is no longer traceable to that source — it is traceable to the individual's own disposition. This severs the relationship that makes norms institutional rather than personal. Post-Loper Bright, AI is expected to become more common in administrative and securities cases as agencies attempt to extend their authority through enforcement action rather than rulemaking — using prosecutorial discretion to create new norms without going through the statutory authority process.

RF 0.11 Recognition Failure — court denies the right (v1 frequency withdrawn) N6/N7

Lower than RCL and RPF despite appearing in roughly 65% of corpus cases. This reflects a core theoretical principle: frequency does not imply severity. The 65% figure is withdrawn. It was produced by v1 annotation RULE 5, which forced RF wherever Node 7 failed; RF was not the most common contradiction type, it was an automatic one. With the rule removed, RF stands at 3.0% across the completed corpus, and much of what it had absorbed is properly Correlativity Contradiction — CC, which v1 recorded just 3 times corpus-wide, now appears in 18.9% of cases and reaches 30.7% in §1983. The weight rationale below is unaffected — it never depended on the frequency — but the “most common CT” label above does not hold: the most common type on v2 data is Norm Indeterminacy at 53.8%. RF fires when the court denies the claimant's asserted right — the legal effect fails to be recognized. This is structurally serious and consequential, but no Hohfeldian correlation is violated: there is no acknowledged right without a correlative duty, because the right is simply denied. The court is operating coherently within the system — it has evaluated the claim and found it insufficient. The relatively modest weight reflects that RF is the normal operation of a legal system that evaluates claims and sometimes rejects them, rather than a fundamental ontological rupture.

FM 0.11 Fact Manipulation — the factual foundation is corrupted N4

Matches RF because both represent serious but structurally bounded failures. FM fires when the triggering facts are fabricated, suppressed, or made indeterminate — the factual foundation of the entire chain is corrupted. The paradigm is a Brady violation: the prosecution withholds evidence that would help the defendant, making the triggering facts structurally indeterminate for the defense. FM is weighted at 0.11 rather than higher because it is in principle remediable — the structural problem is an epistemic failure about facts that, if correctly established, might support a coherent chain. This is qualitatively different from RCL (which requires reconstituting legal subjecthood) or CF (which voids the authority chain). A retrial with correct facts can repair FM. Nothing comparable repairs RCL.

JC 0.10 Jurisdictional Contradiction — two valid norms, incompatible claims N2→N6

Moderate weight because both competing norms are individually legitimate — the problem is their coexistence, not their individual validity. Two authority sources each issue a norm that claims to govern the same conduct, and the norms pull in incompatible directions. This is structurally serious but in principle resolvable through conflict-of-laws analysis, preemption doctrine, or legislative clarification. Neither norm is invalid; the system simply has not yet resolved which one governs. Federal/state conflicts and civil/criminal regime overlaps are the paradigm cases. JC is more remediable than RC3 (where a single actor's roles are irreconcilable) because the resolution mechanism — deciding which norm prevails — is well-established in legal doctrine even if applying it is difficult.

SE 0.10 Self-Undermining Effect — the right destroys the system that recognizes it N7

Matches JC because both involve systemic rather than case-level structural problems. SE fires when the legal effect at Node 7, if fully realized, would destroy the authority source at Node 1 that generates it — a self-referential collapse. The realized right undermines the institutional conditions for its own recognition. This is ontologically precise: the effect's realization destroys the continuants that ground its own authority. SE is weighted moderately because it is rare, highly context-dependent, and philosophically complex — it requires a case where recognizing the right would destabilize the system's capacity to recognize any rights. Cases involving claims against the structural prerequisites of judicial authority itself are the paradigm.

PC 0.09 Procedural Contradiction — the norm blocks its own fulfillment N2→N5

The act required by the norm cannot be performed through the norm's own procedure — a self-blocking realization pathway. Lower weight than NI (which questions what the norm is) and JC (which involves competing authority sources) because PC is a procedural rather than substantive failure. The substantive norm may be perfectly sound; the procedural mechanism that implements it is defective. This is remediable through procedural reform without touching the substantive norm itself. An example: a statute that requires claimants to exhaust administrative remedies before suit, where the administrative remedy process is itself unavailable or takes longer than the statute of limitations allows. The norm is valid; the procedure defeats it.

TC 0.08 Temporal Contradiction — norm and facts misaligned in time N2↔N4

Second-lowest weight because temporal misalignment is the most readily remediable structural failure. TC fires when the norm and triggering facts are misaligned in time — either the norm was not yet in force when the facts arose (retroactivity) or the facts predated the norm's existence (ex post facto). The structural fix is obvious and requires no fundamental ontological reconstitution: the norm simply should not apply to these facts. TC requires temporal boundary clarification, not institutional reconstitution. This is qualitatively different from RCL or CF. A statute that purports to apply retroactively has a structural TC problem, but the remedy — holding it inapplicable — is clean and leaves the rest of the legal system undisturbed.

NI 0.07 Norm Indeterminacy — the governing rule cannot be specified (lowest) N2

The lowest weight for two reasons. First, courts routinely resolve NI in the very opinion that identifies it — they specify the indeterminate norm and apply it, turning an NI into a closed node within the same proceeding. The Garcetti majority reservation (declining to decide academic speech) is a rare case of genuine persistent NI; most NI findings are resolved by the time the opinion issues. Second, NI is often not a failure of the legal system but a recognition that the system has reached the frontier of its current normative development. A norm that is indeterminate today may become determinate through legislative or judicial specification tomorrow. This is qualitatively different from RCL, which strips rights that the system cannot simply declare back into existence, or CF, which voids an authority chain that must be rebuilt from the institutional ground up. NI is structurally significant — an indeterminate norm cannot activate the chain — but it is the most remediable of the thirteen failures.

CD WEIGHT SPECTRUM — CLICK ANY ROW ABOVE TO EXPAND RATIONALE

NI 0.07

TC 0.08

PC 0.09

JC 0.10

SE 0.10

RF 0.11

FM 0.11

AI 0.12

RPF 0.13

RC3 0.14

CC 0.14

CF 0.15

RCL 0.18

Weights range from 0.07 (NI — most remediable) to 0.18 (RCL — most severe). The 2.57:1 spread keeps all thirteen types informative while reflecting genuine theoretical differences. These weights were fixed before any data was collected and have not been tuned to the corpus — a genuine methodological safeguard against overfitting. Note that the 14.0:1 CD/derived-outcome ratio does not validate them: both sides of that ratio are computed from the same node closures, so it reflects internal consistency rather than empirical confirmation.

Quick Glossary

AUC Area Under the Curve — predictive accuracy measure. 0.5 = coin flip; 1.0 = perfect.

BFO Basic Formal Ontology — a philosophical framework for classifying what kinds of things exist.

CD Contradiction Debt — a numerical score measuring structural stress in a legal chain.

CT Contradiction Type — one of thirteen specific structural failure modes indexed to MLC links.

IRAC Issue, Rule, Application, Conclusion — standard legal analysis framework taught in law school.

MLC Minimum Legal Chain — the eight-node structural checklist for legal claim completeness.

RF Recognition Failure — court denies the claimed right exists or applies. (Previously labelled the most common contradiction type; that frequency was an artifact of a removed annotation rule and is withdrawn pending the v2 rebuild.)

RPF Repair Failure — remedy is structurally blocked. Fires on its own textual evidence (5.5% of v2 cases); the v1 cascade from Recognition Failure was a rule artifact and has been removed.

RC3 Role Contradiction — same person bears two roles with incompatible obligations. Garcetti paradigm.

CC Correlativity Contradiction — right acknowledged, correlative duty refused (qualified immunity).

NI Norm Indeterminacy — court cannot specify what rule governs (scope uncertainty, not application).

SOoL Structural Ontology of the Law — the framework (Koepsell, Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming).

RCL Recognition Collapse — subject's capacity to bear rights stripped while obligations continue.

FM Fact Manipulation — triggering facts fabricated or suppressed. Brady violation is the paradigm.

A Structural Ontology of the Law · David R. Koepsell · SEAL Lab, Texas A&M University · Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming
[email protected] · seal.tamu.edu/legal-kernel ·

domain	n	N1	N2	N3	N4	N5	N6	N7	N8
D1 First Amendment	641	0	2	0	3	5	1	58	47
D2 Employment Discriminat	655	0	1	0	7	10	1	57	47
D3 Administrative Law	722	0	3	1	3	11	4	59	43
D4 Criminal Procedure	619	0	0	0	1	6	1	70	58
D5 Immigration	656	0	1	0	4	12	2	59	47
D6 Civil Rights §1983	657	1	3	1	3	10	3	66	53
D7 Contract	640	0	2	0	3	10	2	60	45
D8 Family Law	513	1	4	1	4	9	4	61	51
POOLED	5103	0	2	0	3	9	2	61	49

domain

D1 First Amendment

641

D2 Employment Discriminat

655

D3 Administrative Law

722

D4 Criminal Procedure

619

D5 Immigration

656

D6 Civil Rights §1983

657

D7 Contract

640

D8 Family Law

513

POOLED

5103

type	domain	rate	95% CI	elsewhere	ratio	p
AI Authority Inflation	D3 Administrative Law	14.1%	11.8–16.9	2.6%	5.4×	4e-45
RC3 Role Contradiction ⚠RULE 2	D1 First Amendment	25.3%	22.1–28.8	6.9%	3.6×	2e-50
RF Recognition Failure	D6 Civil Rights §1983	5.6%	4.1–7.7	2.6%	2.2×	4e-05

type

domain

rate

95% CI

elsewhere

ratio

AI Authority Inflation

D3 Administrative Law

14.1%

11.8–16.9

2.6%

5.4×

4e-45

RC3 Role Contradiction ⚠RULE 2

D1 First Amendment

25.3%

22.1–28.8

6.9%

3.6×

2e-50

RF Recognition Failure

D6 Civil Rights §1983

5.6%

4.1–7.7

2.6%

2.2×

4e-05

chain outcome	n	mean CD	95% CI	mean tag count	95% CI
moot	81	0.0140	0.0023–0.0256	0.148	0.028–0.268
dismissed	186	0.1009	0.0861–0.1157	1.070	0.920–1.219
protection_denied	2822	0.1256	0.1213–0.1299	1.237	1.198–1.277
protection_granted	570	0.1447	0.1358–0.1536	1.519	1.431–1.607
remanded	656	0.1512	0.1433–0.1590	1.691	1.611–1.770
partial	788	0.1850	0.1768–0.1931	1.918	1.843–1.992

chain outcome

mean CD

95% CI

mean tag count

95% CI

moot

0.0140

0.0023–0.0256

0.148

0.028–0.268

dismissed

186

0.1009

0.0861–0.1157

1.070

0.920–1.219

protection_denied

2822

0.1256

0.1213–0.1299

1.237

1.198–1.277

protection_granted

570

0.1447

0.1358–0.1536

1.519

1.431–1.607

remanded

656

0.1512

0.1433–0.1590

1.691

1.611–1.770

partial

788

0.1850

0.1768–0.1931

1.918

1.843–1.992

prompt arm	n	effect failed, remedy survived	remedy failed, effect survived	p vs 1:1
production, verbatim	145	19	0	4e-06
directional sentence removed	141	39	0	4e-12
directional sentence inverted	141	31	1	2e-08

prompt arm

effect failed,
remedy survived

remedy failed,
effect survived

p vs 1:1

production, verbatim

145

4e-06

directional sentence removed

141

4e-12

directional sentence inverted

141

2e-08

decade	n	NI rate	N7 fail	mean CD
1990s	832	48.7%	52.4%	0.1187
2000s	1156	50.1%	65.7%	0.1301
2010s	1770	57.2%	62.0%	0.1403
2020s	1310	62.0%	62.3%	0.1518

decade

NI rate

N7 fail

mean CD

1990s

832

48.7%

52.4%

0.1187

2000s

1156

50.1%

65.7%

0.1301

2010s

1770

57.2%

62.0%

0.1403

2020s

1310

62.0%

62.3%

0.1518

type	core-v1 weight	n in subset	r with remedy survival	p
AI Authority Inflation	0.12	103	+0.313	4e-72
PC Procedural Contradiction	0.09	191	+0.285	2e-59
FM Fact Manipulation	0.11	183	+0.133	7e-14
NI Norm Indeterminacy	0.07	1585	+0.097	6e-08
TC Temporal Contradiction	0.08	119	+0.013	0.458
JC Jurisdictional Contradiction	0.10	605	+0.005	0.782
RC3 Role Contradiction	0.14	219	-0.040	0.026
RF Recognition Failure	0.11	132	-0.058	0.001
RPF Repair Procedure Failure	0.13	244	-0.076	2e-05
CC Correlativity Contradiction	0.14	795	-0.130	2e-13

type

core-v1 weight

n in subset

r with remedy survival

AI Authority Inflation

0.12

103

+0.313

4e-72

PC Procedural Contradiction

0.09

191

+0.285

2e-59

FM Fact Manipulation

0.11

183

+0.133

7e-14

NI Norm Indeterminacy

0.07

1585

+0.097

6e-08

TC Temporal Contradiction

0.08

119

+0.013

0.458

JC Jurisdictional Contradiction

0.10

605

+0.005

0.782

RC3 Role Contradiction

0.14

219

-0.040

0.026

RF Recognition Failure

0.11

132

-0.058

0.001

RPF Repair Procedure Failure

0.13

244

-0.076

2e-05

CC Correlativity Contradiction

0.14

795

-0.130

2e-13

pair	obs	exp	obs/exp	χ²(1)	p
AI + PC Authority Inflation / Procedural Contradiction	57	18.9	3.01×	85.4	2e-20
RC3 + CC Role Contradiction / Correlativity Contradiction	178	88.8	2.00×	120.3	5e-28
PC + FM Procedural Contradiction / Fact Manipulation	57	31.0	1.84×	24.8	6e-07
AI + JC Authority Inflation / Jurisdictional Contradiction	78	51.5	1.52×	18.0	2e-05
JC + NI Jurisdictional Contradiction / Norm Indeterminacy	931	670.8	1.39×	295.8	3e-66
NI + RPF Norm Indeterminacy / Repair Procedure Failure	127	158.0	0.80×	14.0	2e-04
FM + CC Fact Manipulation / Correlativity Contradiction	31	66.9	0.46×	24.8	6e-07
PC + CC Procedural Contradiction / Correlativity Contradiction	31	83.9	0.37×	44.2	3e-11
AI + CC Authority Inflation / Correlativity Contradiction	15	40.9	0.37×	20.3	7e-06

pair

obs

exp

obs/exp

χ²(1)

AI + PC Authority Inflation / Procedural Contradiction

18.9

3.01×

85.4

2e-20

RC3 + CC Role Contradiction / Correlativity Contradiction

178

88.8

2.00×

120.3

5e-28

PC + FM Procedural Contradiction / Fact Manipulation

31.0

1.84×

24.8

6e-07

AI + JC Authority Inflation / Jurisdictional Contradiction

51.5

1.52×

18.0

2e-05

JC + NI Jurisdictional Contradiction / Norm Indeterminacy

931

670.8

1.39×

295.8

3e-66

NI + RPF Norm Indeterminacy / Repair Procedure Failure

127

158.0

0.80×

14.0

2e-04

FM + CC Fact Manipulation / Correlativity Contradiction

66.9

0.46×

24.8

6e-07

PC + CC Procedural Contradiction / Correlativity Contradiction

83.9

0.37×

44.2

3e-11

AI + CC Authority Inflation / Correlativity Contradiction

40.9

0.37×

20.3

7e-06

band	share as `ct_count`	share as `cd_case` (Σw, core-v1)
`0`	25.7%	25.7%
`1-2`	57.1%	0.0% (unreachable)
`3-4`	17.0%	0.0% (unreachable)
`5-6`	0.2%	0.0% (unreachable)
`7+`	0.0%	0.0% (unreachable)

band

share as ct_count

share as cd_case (Σw, core-v1)

0

25.7%

1-2

57.1%

0.0% (unreachable)

3-4

17.0%

0.0% (unreachable)

5-6

0.2%

0.0% (unreachable)

7+

0.0%

0.0% (unreachable)

Structural Signature Query

Cross-Domain Family Resemblance

CD Comparative Query

MLC Reference

When the Architecture of Law Predicts Its Outcomes

The Core Idea: Structural Soundness vs. Doctrinal Beauty

The Eight-Step Structural Checklist (The MLC)

Contradiction Debt (`cd_case`): The Structural Stress Score

What This Corpus Can and Cannot Show

Where Law Fails: One Shared Profile, Different Stress Points

What This Means for Lawyers, Theorists, and Students

Why the Weights Are What They Are

Quick Glossary

Structural Ontology of Criminal Law

Structural Reasoner

Ontology Browser

Case Analyzer

Hypothesis Laboratory

Structural Signature Query

Cross-Domain Family Resemblance

CD Comparative Query

MLC Reference

When the Architecture of Law Predicts Its Outcomes

The Core Idea: Structural Soundness vs. Doctrinal Beauty

The Eight-Step Structural Checklist (The MLC)

Contradiction Debt (cd_case): The Structural Stress Score

What This Corpus Can and Cannot Show

Where Law Fails: One Shared Profile, Different Stress Points

What This Means for Lawyers, Theorists, and Students

Why the Weights Are What They Are

Quick Glossary

Structural Ontology of Criminal Law

Structural Reasoner

Ontology Browser

Case Analyzer

Hypothesis Laboratory

Contradiction Debt (`cd_case`): The Structural Stress Score