Selected, Not Self-Evident: General Principles of Law as an Evolutionarily Stable Memetic Core

Doctrine treats certain legal principles as universal: good faith, the right to be heard, the bindingness of agreements, the prohibition on judging one's own cause. The standard account grounds their authority in rational necessity or self-evidence, as if any legal order confronting the same problems would have to recognize them. This paper argues that this universalist self-understanding commits a structural error recently identified in a different domain by Goldfeder, Wyder, LeCun, and Shwartz-Ziv (2026), who demonstrate that human intelligence feels general only because a mind cannot perceive the tasks it cannot perform. The error is symmetrical in law: a jurist trained inside the history that produced the principles encounters them everywhere precisely because that history shaped the jurist and the institutions in which the jurist works. The sense of universality is the illusion of generality in legal dress. This paper proposes an evolutionary account on which the general principles are not universals given in advance but a memetic core that reached quasi-fixation through selection. Their apparent universality is the observable joint signature of three replicator properties identified by Dawkins: high copying fidelity, carried by Latin formulae that resist semantic drift because Latin is a dead language; fecundity, reproduced in codes, curricula, and appellate courts across two millennia; and longevity, with Roman maxims persisting across the collapse of the political orders that first carried them. Quasi-universality, on this reading, is quasifixation in a meme pool, an evolutionarily stable configuration that resists invasion because deviating jurists pay coordination and legitimacy costs unrelated to the merits of their deviation. The reframing is falsable. It predicts cross-jurisdictional variation in the enumerated set tracking legal lineage, locally extinct principles, and drift under environmental change. Each prediction has empirical content: caveat emptor underwent documented sequential extinction across jurisdictions as consumer protection legislation changed the selective environment; the abus de droit doctrine emerged independently in Louisiana and continental Europe without cross-citation, demonstrating convergent evolution under shared selective pressure; and the arrival of new agent types, corporations in the nineteenth century and artificial systems now, constitutes a shift in the environment that selects against principles calibrated for natural persons. Strict universalism anticipates none of these observations. One consequence for computational legal systems follows: a principle layer encoded as a closed list of universals mistakes a selected strategy for an axiom and should instead be modeled as an open, revisable set observed in a given legal environment. The argument is a protective-belt adjustment within the extended-phenotype research programme, not a refutation of it. This record is part of the Law as Extended Phenotype research program.