Constitutional Standing and Lawful Succession

This preprint introduces constitutional standing as an architectural primitive for governing identity-preserving change in long-lived computational systems. It argues that continuity alone is insufficient to determine which proposed successor is entitled to become operative: multiple candidates may preserve the same identity conditions while differing in predecessor validity, evidence, authority, freshness, or causal legitimacy. The paper defines lawful succession as a predecessor-governed relation that separates candidate generation, semantic admissibility, authority, evidence publication, and exact commit. It develops a constitutional microkernel architecture, refusal semantics, derivation-closure requirements, and recursive rules for changes to identity-bearing components and to the admission regime itself. A bounded executable implementation is used to demonstrate the realizability of these separations and to map key properties—including predecessor exactness, replay refusal, single-successor lineage, and resource non-semanticity—to concrete evidence. The central claim is that a changing system remains governable only when causal force is mediated by standing rather than inferred from generation, execution, or possession of authority alone.