Coded and Unfunded: Legal Provision without a Party

Correction produces non-events (the failure that did not occur, the loss that never matured) and a legal order attaches a return by identifying a lapse that reduces someone's holdings by an amount it can price. The persistence of a capacity that prevents events is not such a lapse. So correction has no loss of its own, and where it is funded it is funded through a loss borrowed from elsewhere: a capacity may hold every attribute a legal order can confer and remain unfunded. A claim regime determines what investment yields a return some party can hold and defend; where returns to a capacity's persistence attach to no party, no allocation rule responsive to enforceable return will fund it --- not because anyone decides, and not because the capacity is hard to code, but because the rule has nothing to respond to. Correction capacity is where this bites, since the return to correction is a non-event and a non-event attaches to nobody. Six regimes are examined, across three jurisdictions and four centuries. Those that fund correction are the ones in which its lapse falls on a party whose loss is real and individually held; the completest conferral in the set and the highest instrument in the set are both on the unfunded side, and where conferral was fullest and no such party existed, recognition produced nothing.