Jülich Michael

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.

Generative AI can convert uncertainty into authoritative-seeming verdicts, displacing the justificatory work on which democratic epistemic agency depends. As a corrective, I propose a Brouwer-inspired assertibility constraint for responsible AI: in high-stakes domains, systems may assert or deny claims only if they can provide a publicly inspectable and contestable certificate of entitlement; otherwise they must return Undetermined. This constraint yields a three-status interface semantics (Asserted, Denied, Undetermined) whose statuses mark entitlement to categorical speech rather than truth values of the underlying world-claim. The framework distinguishes internal entitlement from public standing while connecting them through the certificate as a boundary object. Philosophically, it develops a form of applied intuitionism: resistance to unwarranted completeness becomes a norm of public machine speech, under which categorical commitment requires exhibited and contestable entitlement. I operationalize the constraint through structured certificates, decision-layer gates for threshold and argmax predicates, and a reason-coded output contract. A design lemma shows that, under a refutation-soundness condition on the contractually specified negative side, certificate-sound binary totality presupposes witnessed decidability on the declared scope. Under the output contract, Undetermined is therefore not a tunable reject option but a mandatory status whenever the available certificates do not uniquely license assertion or denial. By making outputs answerable to contestable warrants rather than confidence alone, the paper aims to preserve epistemic agency where automated speech enters public justification.

Drawing inspiration from scientific structural realists, I introduce structural normativism to the legal domain. This novel approach advocates for understanding laws, principles, and precedents primarily through their structural composition rather than as isolated entities. Consider the European Union: We regard the EU as a distinct legal subject, even though it primarily embodies an intricate web of structures. To support my theory, I study the order relations of legal systems, the intricacies of legal balancing, and the foundations of legal dogmatic theories. My research proposes that normative entities are best conceptualised as emerging from modal structures, which direct the validation of individual norms in a legal reality characterised by necessary, possible, impossible, and contingent facts. Could this approach enhance our understanding of legal adaptability, coherence, and predictability? With further research, especially in the field of Artificial Intelligence, structural normativism might improve consistency in legal decision-making and provide insights for lawyers, judges, policymakers and legal scholars alike. By exploring how this approach could present a no-miracles argument of law, I aspire to add a normative dimension to the structural project.

„Der introvertierte Gedankenarchitekt wohnt hinter dem Mond, den die extrovertierten Techniker beschlagnahmen.“ Begibt sich der Rechtswissenschaftler in die philosophischen Tiefen der Reinen Rechtslehre, dann erscheint die Grundnorm als eine janusköpfige Figur, die den erstaunten Leser vor ein Rätsel stellt. Ihre äquivoke Natur manifestiert sich dabei nicht nur in Kelsens variabler Bezeichnung derselben, sondern ebenso im Wandel seiner erkenntnistheoretischen Konzeptionen. Spricht Kelsen in den zwanziger Jahren noch von einer „hypothetische[n]Annahme“, so mutiert die Grundnorm in den dreißiger Jahren zur „transzendental- logische[n] Bedingung“, um am Ende seiner Schaffenszeit in einer „echten […] Fiktion im Sinne der Vaihingerschen Philosophie des Als-Ob“ zu kulminieren. Bedenkt man, dass hier die schillernde Frage nach der Letztbegründung von Recht aufgeworfen wird, dann verwundert es nicht, dass die Rezeption der Grundnorm variiert, vom Postulat, „das Herz und die Seele der Reinen Rechtslehre“ zu sein, über einen „herausragenden Platz“, bis hin zum „Denkbehelf im Dienste der Selbstreferenz des Rechts“.