From Ontological Fixation to Normative Persistence: The Normative Status of Structural Traces. Article 14

Article 13 of the ATTS series established that a boundary event of subjecthood necessarily leaves a structural trace — a KN2-type configuration in the loss-space — whose ontological weight is fixed at the moment of the constitutive act independently of the bearer's subsequent existence (the Ontological Fixation Principle). This article addresses the question that principle leaves open: whether such a trace retains normative significance — the capacity to ground a claim — in the absence of a living bearer. Its subject is not merely the posthumous fate of claims but the ontology of normative latency in general, of which the bearer's death is only a limiting case. Five independent legal traditions — succession, historical restitution, indigenous claims, cultural property restitution, state continuity — independently reproduce the same structure without explaining it ontologically. The article proposes a minimal apparatus: a latent normative configuration, a property of a KN2-type configuration (not a new ontological type) satisfying three conditions — irreversible historical fixation, a persistent structural trace, structural aptitude for attribution — and formulates the Normative Trace Persistence Lemma (NTPL). NTPL is refuted by a configuration that satisfies all three conditions yet remains structurally inaccessible to attribution regardless of institutional design. The article distinguishes the ontological persistence of significance from the institutional possibility of its activation, closing the gap inherited from Article 13.