AUTHORITY ORIGINATION AND THE CONSTITUTIONAL GENESIS OF AUTHORITY A Constitutional Theory of Authority Origination in Replay-Authoritative Systems

The Constitutional Replay-Authority corpus has established the primitive architecture necessary for replay-authoritative determination, including Authority Origination, Authority Singularity, Governance Freezing, Explicit Materialization, and Fail-Closed Design. This paper expands the Authority Origination primitive by examining the constitutional process through which authority becomes associated with the definitions governing a decision condition. Authority Origination is shown to be distinct from artifact creation, distinct from replay-authoritative preservation, and prior to legitimacy determination. The analysis further examines the problem of authority regress. If authority derives from prior authority, justification appears capable of extending indefinitely. To address this, the paper proposes the Constitutional Termination Principle, under which replay-authoritative determination requires a constitutionally sufficient authority lineage terminating in a recognized authority foundation adequate to establish the authoritative significance of the definitions governing the decision condition. The paper concludes that replay-authoritative determination depends not only upon preservation of governing artifacts, but also upon preservation of sufficient constitutional evidence to establish why governing definitions possessed authority at the moment of decision. Authority therefore emerges as a distinct constitutional object of inquiry.