Lawhood Before Laws: Invariance, Admissibility, and Regime Transformation

This paper defines lawhood as invariant admissibility constraint preserved under regime transformation. It develops a domain-independent classification framework for distinguishing laws from regularities, rules, models, protocols, predictions, principles, support conditions, juridical norms, external instantiations, and failure modes. The central test is whether the admissibility constraint associated with a candidate law remains preserved when the relevant regime of evaluation changes. The paper introduces a minimal formal vocabulary and a failure-mode classification method for evaluating non-preservation, non-evaluability, restriction, reformulation, and reclassification of lawhood claims. It applies this framework to regime-changing systems across philosophy of science, physics, biology, computation, complex systems, institutional analysis, constitutional transformation, and cross-domain model transfer.