CONSTITUTIONAL AUTHORITY CONTINUITY Authority Persistence, Rupture, and Succession in Replay-Authoritative Systems

The Constitutional Replay-Authority corpus has now established how authority originates through a distinct constitutional process and how the objects bearing that authority can be recognized as the same objects across replay. These contributions presuppose something further. They presuppose that authority, once originated, remains constitutionally connected to later moments of governance, enforcement, or replay determination. Authority may begin validly yet fail to persist under the conditions that replay-authoritative systems require. This paper supplies the missing constitutional account of authority persistence. It introduces Constitutional Authority Continuity as the condition under which validly originated authority remains constitutionally connected across time, change, delegation, migration, institutional succession, and replay. The analysis develops a compact set of required concepts: Constitutional Authority Continuity, Authority Chain, Continuity-Preserving Change, Continuity Rupture, Authority Succession, and Authority Expiration. It demonstrates that replay-authoritative determination cannot proceed with legitimacy unless the system can establish that the authority governing the replay subject remained continuous with the authority that originally constituted the decision condition. Without such continuity, replay collapses into reconstruction under uncertain or severed authority rather than authoritative constitutional verification. The paper concludes that constitutional authority is temporal. It must be preserved through recognizable constitutional conditions rather than presumed from historical origin alone. A replay-authoritative system that cannot distinguish continuity-preserving change from continuity rupture cannot render legitimate determinations about the authority under which past decisions were made.