From Constitution to Street Level

Seventeen chapters and two appendices. The paper proposes a three-plane model of American legal order (Authority, Implementation, Feedback Mesh), three gates through which reality returns to law (Detection, Correction, Norm Production), three forms of divergence, and three institutional adaptations. Its second contribution is institutional resolution mismatch: the unit that supplies external legal constraint, the unit at which administrative decisions actually occur, and the unit at which public data is recorded frequently do not coincide — so the way an institution is produced shapes not only how it governs but how observable it is at all.

Why does one person's anomaly eventually become law, while another person's anomaly becomes nothing more than an episode in their own life?

1. 01Legal authority is most abstract where it is most supreme; coercive force is strongest at the lowest, least visible layer.
2. 02Reality does not return to law automatically: someone must notice it, name it, fund it, and translate it into a question a court can read.
3. 03Standing, jurisdiction, finality, reviewability, and remedy are gates, and each gate filters which lived facts ever become legal facts.
4. 04Street-level discretion is a norm-production site, not merely an execution site.
5. 05Accardi-type constraints show that an agency's own rules can bind it, but only when a claimant can reach a forum.
6. 06Private enforcement means the correction capacity of American law is distributed across cities, counties, nonprofits, and private counsel.
7. 07Institutional resolution mismatch makes many governance outcomes structurally unmeasurable rather than merely unmeasured.
8. 08Rule of law is therefore not only a question of whether rules exist, but of who is able to turn their own reality into a legal question.

This page is the abstract and outline. The full text is not published on this site.