Rule-of-Law Drift

Rule-of-Law Drift: Legal Constraint Erosion Under Procedural Continuity Develops a theorem-driven structural account of how legal systems may preserve procedural continuity, formal legality, and institutional operation while gradually losing effective legal constraint. The article distinguishes legal distinctness, attribution clarity, constraint enforceability, non-arbitrary application, and operational continuity, and derives a conditional process model explaining how substitute legality, procedural substitution, norm inflation, and declining corrective capacity may become structurally available under continued legal operation. The framework is explicitly non-diagnostic: it does not claim that any jurisdiction is experiencing rule-of-law drift. Instead, it provides a bounded theoretical architecture, observable implications, rival-model differentiation, blocker analysis, and falsification criteria for future empirical research. Within the author's broader research architecture, the article is a downstream governance and legal-institutional extension connected to, but analytically distinct from, the theorem-driven crime-process and prevention-fit research programme. Primary programme location: Society, Democracy, Organisation, and Education Research Programme. Secondary programme location: Theorem-Driven Crime Process Research Programme.