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The Law of Jurisdictional Reacquisition

Intelligence can cross a boundary more easily than authority can. A physicist may enter economics; a statistical model may move from one population to another; a legal doctrine may be exported into another jurisdiction; an analogy may migrate from biology into politics; an artificial intelligence may pass from medicine to engineering to law without changing interface, voice, or apparent confidence. Such crossings can create knowledge. They can also conceal a fundamental asymmetry: the survival of competence does not entail the survival of the warrant that made reliance upon that competence justified. This treatise formulates the Law of Jurisdictional Reacquisition: Authority is not conserved across an epistemic boundary. When the conditions that warranted an intelligence's authority materially change, only warrant demonstrated to survive the crossing may travel with it; every domain-dependent remainder must be reacquired under the conditions of the receiving world. The law does not defend disciplinary enclosure. It distinguishes boundaries of warranted reliance from boundaries of profession, credential, or institution. An outsider may acquire greater jurisdiction than an incumbent; an artificial intelligence may exceed every human specialist; a receiving discipline may itself possess defective standards. What the law prohibits is neither crossing nor intellectual revolution, but the unearned conservation of authority. The argument develops a general account of epistemic regimes, material crossings, warrant invariance, jurisdictional distance, authority debt, transfer warrants, composite jurisdiction, and jurisdiction ledgers. It shows why the problem survives the disappearance of present disciplines and why greater artificial intelligence may intensify rather than dissolve it. Its deepest proposition is independent of any present technology: Where the conditions that justify authority change, authority survives only to the extent that its justification survives. Whatever does not survive must be justified again.