The Order of Physical Law

First-order legal relations specify the duties of legal actors. For instance, the duty not to trespass derives from a first-order law. Second-order legal relations generally concern the intentional, volitional acts of legal actors exercising legal powers to change first-order laws or legal relations. For example, a land owner may exercise a second-order power to change another legal actor’s duty not to trespass to a legal permission to enter the owner’s land. This article adapts the notion of legal order to propose a theory of first- and higher-order physical laws, contending that current physical theories implicitly (and wrongly) assume that essentially all physical processes can be modeled using first-order laws. Incorporating second- and higher-order structures from legal models into physical theories provides a novel approach for framing problems in physics, such as the process of quantum measurement. Specifically, quantum measurement is better explained as a fundamentally second-order physical process, which alters the underlying first-order physical “microlaws” governing the evolution of the quantum system.