Law restructuring#

Use when: laws overlap, need a missing distinction, or might be better expressed by merging, splitting, replacing, or removing them.

Inputs: the original laws with their authority, motivations, examples, and limits. Include existing oracle owners. Do not simplify labels without first recovering the obligations they represent.

Operation#

1. Decompose the laws into traceable obligations, conditions, distinctions, and promised observations. Check that these parts can reconstruct each original claim; invented categories can lose the essential constraint. If public wording and an executable owner disagree, retain both claims and the unresolved authority. A passing test alone cannot retire public wording.
2. Propose a different organization and state the operation: merge under a common principle, split by authority or checkpoint, replace a concept, or retire an obligation with an explicit reason. Fewer words or model fields alone do not establish improvement.
3. Map every original obligation to where it is preserved, narrowed, strengthened, rejected, or still unresolved in the candidate. State what insight originally made the obligation necessary. A claim may be defeated, but needs a reason and a design decision rather than disappearing from the mapping.
4. Derive old and proposed predictions for a witness exercising each distinction that the reorganization could erase. Compare both allowed and forbidden outcomes. Check whether the change accidentally forbids a valid implementation or admits one of the formerly rejected wrong designs.
5. When an independent preservation check is useful and authorized, give a fresh agent the original obligation, its sources, and one candidate. Hide sibling candidates and the author's preferred outcome. Ask what insight survives, what is defeated, and what smallest repair is needed. Without that separation, describe the result as a trace audit, not independent validation.

Return: the proposed organization, the old-to-new obligation mapping, witnesses and their evidence status, losses, and unresolved design decisions. Keeping the existing laws separate is a valid result.

Control: reconstruct each original obligation from the candidate and check its discriminating witness. A semantic change may be justified, but is not an equivalent refactor. Merging prose does not require merging executable owners whose models or production boundaries differ.

Distortion: neat categories that erase obligations, speculative connections presented as established, or preserving familiar wording instead of useful insight.

Stop when: the alternative's preservation and losses are explicit, or the source obligations cannot be reconstructed. Do not adopt a replacement merely because this operation produced it.

Adapted from Field Lab's structural recombinator and position-preservation assay.