Material Bounded Finality: A Finite Feasibility Model of Correctable Final Authority

Consequential institutions often require decisions that close an action path while still preserving routes for review, correction, revocation, and institutional change. This paper asks a narrower implementation question: under what material conditions can an authority make a binding operational decision and still remain capable of losing authority in a way that matters? I develop material bounded finality, a constitutional design composition built from established ideas in constitutional pluralism, organizational authority, fault-tolerant distributed systems, assurance engineering, continuity planning, and AI control. “Constitutional” is used here functionally: it refers to rules governing the creation, scope, correction, amendment, continuation, and succession of authority, not to a claim that every technical system is a constitution in public-law doctrine. The protected object is a complete material correction path from standing and evidence through independent judgment to operative remedy and, where continuity of a protected function is independently required, adequate succession. Corrigibility is evaluated relative to an explicit adversary floor, preserved across dependency and trust changes, maintained through cross-configuration handoff, and protected against weakening of the assumptions used to certify it. A separate reserve model distinguishes carrying-capacity reserve from state/provenance portability. Within a stated linear model it yields a deadline condition and a derived corrigibility horizon: the first time at which formal removal powers can remain unchanged while no independent successor can be made adequate within the protected correction interval. The paper contributes a constructive finite feasibility witness rather than a general theorem of constitutional design. A custom exhaustive checker enumerates 62,328 reachable states and 297,808 transitions. It checks the represented safety invariants and transition-enabledness conditions and establishes bounded existential external reachability: from each of 15,288 correction-start states, a material remedy is reachable within two external transitions and an independent successor within seven, equal to the modeled deadline. These are reachability results, not scheduler-independent liveness theorems. Targeted mutations confirm that the implemented guards are connected to the stated obligations, while not establishing minimality or necessity. The result establishes non-emptiness of the encoded conjunction under the declared finite assumptions; it does not establish universal necessity, empirical AI growth rates, full recursive governance, or the absence of an exogenous rule-level floor. Supplementary reproducibility package: DOI 10.5281/zenodo.22818297.