Jurisdictional Negation: A Formal Specification

This paper develops Jurisdictional Negation (JN), a formal operator that adjudi- cates whether a governance-attempting claim has earned the authority to govern, without adjudicating whether the claim is true. JN yields one of four verdicts (Govern, Delimit, Demote, or Discard) through a pre-admission eligibility cascade rather than through an evaluation of substantive content. A claim must declare, prior to any adjudication, the domain over which it asserts authority, the domain it does not govern, and the conditions under which it loses or relinquishes authority. Failure to meet this declarative requirement results in Discard, not refutation. The operator is built on Reified Input/Output Logic, with constitutive and regulative layers separated through a governance detachment wrapper; the resulting verdict function is total, determinate, and decidable under stated conditions. A reflexive construction establishes that JN itself receives Delimit when applied to itself, demonstrating that the operator does not totalize. A cascade gate (Erreichen) blocks claims whose declared scope reaches into ter- ritory the apparatus structurally cannot adjudicate. An auxiliary layer (Poros) provides append-only temporal accountability while extending the base operator conservatively.