The Book · Chapter 4 of 28
Chapter 4Fragmented Legality and the Coherence Requirement
How can distributed institutions remain legally coherent without concentrating all information and power?
The chapter develops
The Coherence Requirement.
The Coherence Requirement
Authority, institutions, data, finance, implementation and remedy must remain connected.
Doctrine 3 of the Book’s twenty-one. A proposed formulation, not an enacted rule.
Summary
Individually sound systems can combine into an arrangement that no institution can explain or correct. This chapter develops the Coherence Requirement as the treatise’s proposed answer to that problem. It maps six seams of fragmentation: interpretive, temporal, institutional, evidentiary, remedial and jurisdictional. Their legal significance lies in failures of knowable norms, attributable action, reviewable outcomes and effective remedy, which ordinary efficiency measures can conceal. Conceptual analysis is tested against specifically bounded findings from Robodebt, SyRI and the Dutch childcare-benefits inquiry, without treating these records as proof of a single universal cause. The proposed requirement connects authority, interpretation, data, finance, action, evidence and correction while protecting lawful institutional differences. Whole-chain coherence supplies the constitutional standard; continuous evidence at legal-technical coupling points supplies the compliance standard. Coherence therefore requires traceable, authorised relationships and systemic remedies, with an express prohibition on treating it as permission for universal centralisation.
- Coherence Requirement
- whole-chain coherence
- coupling-point coherence
- legal interoperability
- constitutional latency
- lawful divergence
- systemic remedy
- institutional fragmentation
The chapter text
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