Werner on The Physics of Law

Swen Werner, My Digital Truth, has published The Physics Of Law. Here is the abstract.

This paper interrogates the structural preconditions of lawful decision-making by showing that law is a symbolic system grounded in logical coherence, semantic stability, and operational consistency. It argues that contemporary legal interpretation increasingly abandons these foundational requirements, leading to a form of institutional dysfunction where law devolves into a belief system. Drawing from Roman legal architecture, computational logic, and legal theory, the paper reframes rights not as normative entitlements but as structurally necessary constraints within a rule-based system. It proposes a non-normative justification for private property as a logical gate enabling coherent legal action among actors with equal rights and no default duties. Through critical analysis of machine adjudication, AI unreliability, and copyright enforcement, it illustrates how legal coherence is undermined when the symbolic form of law is severed from its functional logic. The paper concludes by presenting a framework to restore lawful governance through epistemic clarity and constraint-based reasoning, arguing that legal systems must enforce coherence or collapse into ritualized control. Law is not opinion - it is computation.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.