The Theory of Human Centrality (TCH): Normative Autonomy and the Epistemic Limits of Law

The Theory of Human Centrality (TCH), developed from the Portuguese formulation Teoria da Centralidade Humana, is a general theory of law built upon a distinction between normative autonomy and epistemic self-sufficiency. It argues that law retains authority to define validity, rights, duties, competences, responsibilities, and legal consequences while recognizing that legal reasoning alone cannot adequately explain every human phenomenon on which legal decisions depend. TCH therefore places the human being at the integrating center of fact, value, norm, interpretation, decision, and consequence, treating persons not as an additional category within legal analysis but as the point from which legally relevant facts emerge and upon which legal power ultimately operates. From this premise, the theory develops a structured framework composed of epistemic insufficiency, human antecedence of facts, necessary scientific integration, correspondence between power and cognition, human consequences, continuity of state responsibility, and the TCH Epistemic Necessity Test. The test employs relevance, reliability, materiality, necessity, and proportionality to determine when external scientific knowledge ceases to be optional enrichment and becomes necessary to responsible legal cognition. TCH does not subordinate law to science, transfer normative authority to experts, or endorse determinism, scientism, or unlimited inquiry into individual life. Its central claim is narrower and more demanding: law may remain normatively autonomous while becoming epistemically open whenever an adequate understanding of the person, the fact, the relationship, or the consequences of a decision requires knowledge that legal doctrine cannot generate by itself. In this sense, TCH proposes a human-centered architecture for legal reasoning capable of integrating scientific knowledge without dissolving the autonomy, responsibility, or normative character of law.