The Book · Chapter 23 of 28
Chapter 23Traceable Authority and Evidentiary Integrity
What minimum record makes review effective, and how should law respond when a responsible institution failed to preserve it?
The chapter develops
Traceable Authority, with its complementary condition of Evidentiary Integrity.
Traceable Authority
Legally significant computational action must produce a reviewable evidentiary record.
Doctrine 18 of the Book’s twenty-one. A proposed formulation, not an enacted rule.
Summary
A system may retain millions of events yet leave no usable account of the authority it exercised. This chapter distinguishes technical logs from legal records through Traceable Authority and its complementary condition, Evidentiary Integrity. It specifies the source, data, system and decision provenance needed to reconstruct a consequential act, including versions, institutional adoption and subsequent correction. The Horizon litigation supplies the principal case study, alongside electronic-evidence scholarship, provenance standards and jurisdiction-specific logging and disclosure provisions. The chapter examines reconstruction without exact replay, protected access, retention, vendor exit and the privacy costs of excessive recording. When records are missing, it proposes proportionate production burdens and consequences while distinguishing unproved pedigree from actual absence of authority. The doctrine neither makes authentic evidence legally conclusive nor prescribes indiscriminate capture; its aim is an intelligible institutional memory capable of supporting individual, class-wide and systemic correction.
- Traceable Authority
- Evidentiary Integrity
- legal-computational record
- multidimensional provenance
- historical reconstruction
- production burden
- layered disclosure
- institutional memory
How the chapter opens
JUS.automica
Traceable Authority and Evidentiary Integrity
A record must connect the legal warrant, the system that acted and the consequence experienced, while keeping proof distinct from authority.
Legal source
warrant
Data
facts used
System
version
Decision
reasons
What happened?
Reconstruct action, sequence and consequence.
Was it authorised?
Test source, competence and lawful adoption.
Missing record: disclosure, reconstruction and a legally justified evidentiary response.
Reading the figure
The strands reconstruct one event. They support two different inquiries: what occurred and whether it was authorised. A missing strand creates an evidentiary problem; it does not itself establish nullity.
Source: Chapter 23, sections 23.2.2 and 23.7.
The chapter text
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