01 · Legal mandate
Which law authorises the decision, and what purpose does it establish?
A technical process cannot supply the lawful authority that its institution never possessed.
06 · Decision Trace
Trace where responsibility can disappear.
A person receives notice that an automated public-benefit system has found them ineligible. The notice names an outcome, but not the policy translation, data record, computational process or institutional choice that produced it. Use the trace to move from legal mandate to effective remedy.
How to use it
Move forward from authority and backward from consequence.
Begin with the source of lawful authority and record who translated it into policy, criteria, procurement requirements and system behaviour. Name the people and institutions able to inspect, interrupt and change each part.
Then begin with the human consequence and move backward. Ask where the relevant information can be seen, which assumptions can be challenged, who must give reasons and whether the available forum can change the condition producing the harm.
Relationships under transformation
Legal relationships must follow the movement of power.
The inherited form remains important, but governance must also reach the practical conditions through which authority is exercised and consequences are produced.
Authority
From a visible office
To a chain of mandate, policy, software and operation
Responsibility
From the final human act
To control, knowledge, design, duty and institutional capacity
Sovereignty
From formal jurisdiction
To practical control over data, standards, infrastructure and recovery
Rights
From abstract entitlement
To intelligibility and usability inside the actual system
Remedy
From reversal of one act
To correction of the process and conditions producing harm
Human oversight
From a ceremonial approval
To informed power to understand, refuse, change and answer
The rights and remedy loop
Relief must return to the system and change it.
01
Exercise of power
02
Human consequence
03
Right
04
Explanation
05
Review
06
Remedy
07
System correction
This trace does not treat the acknowledgement of one injury as a complete remedy when the condition producing the injury remains unchanged.
For the full doctrinal argument behind this instrument, read the separate public draft.
Read When Power Becomes Architecture