CONSTITUTIONAL PRIMITIVES OF REPLAY-AUTHORITATIVE LEGITIMACY Primitive Architecture and Legitimacy-State Analysis in Constitutional Replay-Authority

Prior work in this corpus defined Constitutional Replay-Authority as a distinct infrastructure category and identified the Computational Legitimacy Gap as the structural deficiency that necessitates it. Subsequent work developed a taxonomy of the category and its constitutional requirements. These contributions established the category, its motivating problem, and a classificatory framework. They did not, however, identify the primitive constitutional foundation upon which replay-authoritative legitimacy depends, nor did they fully address the constitutional nature of legitimacy itself. This paper introduces Legitimacy State Theory and a formal primitive evaluation framework for Constitutional Replay-Authority. It argues that legitimacy is not an opinion, interpretation, certification, assessment, assertion, inference, probability, confidence level, or institutional preference. It is a governed constitutional state whose existence depends upon the satisfaction of specific, irreducible constitutional requirements at the moment of decision. The paper identifies five constitutional primitives—Authority Origination, Authority Singularity, Governance Freezing, Explicit Materialization, and Fail-Closed Design—and demonstrates through removal tests and unique failure-mode analysis that these primitives perform distinct and non-substitutable functions. It further distinguishes primitives from derived constitutional consequences, using the Reconstruction Impossibility Principle as the central example. The paper concludes that these primitives collectively establish the minimum constitutional foundation necessary for replay-authoritative legitimacy and provide the architectural basis for the remainder of the corpus.