The Continuum of Law: An Intuitionistic Social Ontology of Normative Systems

This article advances an intuitionistic social ontology of legal order as a generative artifactual normative system. Hierarchical and momentary-system models inadequately explain how positive law revises the terms of its development yet maintains systemic unity: the former tend to rigidify legal order, the latter to fragment it. Drawing on Brouwer's potential infinity and free choice sequences, I reconstruct legal order as an open-ended branching structure in which legal constructions are individuated by their pathways rather than by state-descriptions. A normative spread distinguishes historical realization from operative status, and higher-order restrictions modify the continuation-space of realized pathways without erasing their history. This architecture captures derogation, suspension, reactivation, and defective but legally effective acts as transformations of one continuing order. Beyond Raz's temporal resolution of Ross's constitutional self-amendment puzzle, the model shows how an authorizing pathway persists through the reconfiguration of its competence-region and how legally recognized partial self-reference operates there. A structural dilemma constrains the terminus of any self-revising normative order: a contentful terminus outside internal regulation would be an entrenched norm, while one subject to that regulation cannot serve as a restriction-invariant point of formal unity. Only a contentless root resolves the dilemma; Kelsen's Grundnorm is accordingly recast as the empty sequence. Law is thus treated as the paradigmatic case of a broader class of artifactual normative systems that transform their own conditions of continuation.