Ableman Constitutional Governance

Systems change. Software is updated, constitutions are amended, models are realized, certificates are rotated, artifacts are replicated, standards are superseded, and institutions acquire successors. Yet change alone does not establish continuity. Ableman Constitutional Governance, or ACG, proposes that governed continuity requires four jointly necessary functions: an Interpretation Regime establishing what the governed object is and what counts as preserving its identity; an Admissibility Law distinguishing legitimate transformation from arbitrary mutation; an Authority Binding making that law operative rather than advisory; and Lineage Continuity relating predecessor, transformation, and successor through time. ACG was developed as a governance discipline, but its recurrence across model realization, execution, custody, kernel design, software succession, regulatory modification, standards processes, cryptographic trust, and scientific versioning suggests a broader hypothesis: ACG may describe the minimum constitutional form required whenever a system claims that a changed object is the legitimate continuation of a prior object. This paper develops that hypothesis, distinguishes the four functions through natural ablations, explains why fused rival models lose diagnostic power, and argues that kernelization is a specialized application of ACG because an operative kernel must define inherited identity, admissible descendants, binding conformance authority, and version lineage. Preliminary external validation found substantial cross-domain support. A frozen v0.1 instrument produced 69 of 72 exact judgments across two same-session passes. A contamination-declared coder from a different model family later agreed on 65 of 72 and 68 of 72 judgments against those passes, with minimum component kappas of 0.857 and 0.880, respectively, while finding no candidate falsifier. Those results remain evidence under instrument v0.1 only. A clarified instrument v0.2 is introduced here by explicit supersession for future independent review. The present claim is bounded: ACG is a falsifiable functional-necessity conjecture for governed identity continuity, not yet a universal theorem and not a sufficient condition for safety, justice, liveness, semantic adequacy, or trustworthy execution.