Constitutional Replay-Authority: A Category-Defining Paper for Computational Legitimacy and Replay Verification

This paper introduces Constitutional Replay-Authority as a distinct infrastructure category for computational legitimacy and replay verification. Modern computational systems, particularly artificial intelligence platforms, now participate directly in consequential decisions across finance, healthcare, regulation, and critical infrastructure. Stakeholders increasingly require the ability to determine—sometimes years later—whether a decision can be authoritatively verified under the precise information, governing policies, authority conditions, and decision-bound materials that existed at the moment it was made. Existing infrastructure categories (logging, observability, explainability, provenance, governance, and security) provide valuable capabilities but were not designed to establish constitutional continuity with original decision conditions. Constitutional Replay-Authority addresses this gap by defining the requirements for replay-authoritative legitimacy. Its defining objective is: “THIS system made THIS decision, under THESE policies, using THIS information — and that decision can be authoritatively replay-verified.” This revised edition serves as the category-defining foundation of a completed eight-paper foundational corpus that fully articulates the constitutional architecture required for replay-authoritative systems.