The Invariant Core: Why Dworkin's Right-Answer Doctrine Functions as an Equilibrium Selector, and Why the Invariant Is Not Trivial

This working paper reads Ronald Dworkin's right-answer doctrine not as a claim about external moral truth, but as a mechanism for selecting among multiple legally admissible equilibria. It argues that what remains invariant across Dworkin's successive reconstructions is not the generic injunction that judges should reason rather than invent, but the stronger no-stopping-point commitment: the denial that available legal materials can ever fail to rank candidate answers. The paper uses evolutionary game theory, extended phenotype theory, and infrapolitical analysis to explain why that commitment can acquire exceptional transmission fitness in prestige economies that reward principled moral resolution, while explicitly withdrawing an earlier proportionality-based proxy and specifying future empirical tests instead. This record is part of the Law as Extended Phenotype research program.