Open Problems in the Jurisprudence of Generativity

Companion work develops a framework in which value is generated by a relational configuration rather than by any party to it, and is therefore not decomposable in advance into shares belonging to parties who existed before the configuration did. Applying that framework to questions of ownership, transfer, and remedy produces a determinate negative result and then stops. This paper states where it stops. Twenty-one problems are set out, each with the argument that produces it, the downstream questions it renders unanswerable, and what would defeat it. The problems are not independent. One of them asks whether a generative capacity and the conditions of its exercise can be separately identified at all, and if that question has no affirmative answer then six of the others are not problems in their own right but appearances of it. Two further problems are independent of that question and survive any answer to it: that a capacity transferred without diminution defeats the exclusion and depletion premises of the property model, and that comparing what two holders would generate requires a measure across kinds that may not exist. Three entries are marked, and the marks matter. One records an error in the author's own reasoning rather than a difficulty in the subject, one records a repair that was proposed and then defeated, and one records the single question the framework has settled, included so that the list cannot be read as uniformly negative. The paper claims that stating this structure is a result. A framework that returned confident answers here would be one that had smuggled back in the decomposition it set out to deny, and the strongest reason for setting the problems out in order is to make that smuggling visible when it occurs.