Infinivoids and the ontological woodpecker
How a single formal insight collapses an entire rhetorical legal structure
Disclaimer:
This essay discusses general principles of legal ontology and public-law theory.
It is not commentary on any specific, live, or ongoing proceedings.
Nothing here should be taken as prejudging the outcome of any particular case.
Introduction: What If the Court on Your Summons Isn’t Real?
Imagine opening the post one morning and finding a criminal summons.
You read the allegation.
You read the date.
And then you read the name of the court.
It looks… off.
Not a place you recognise.
Not a court you’ve ever heard of.
Not a building you could walk into.
You check the government’s Court Finder.
Nothing.
You Google it.
Still nothing.
A small but serious question appears:
Is it possible to be summoned to a court that does not exist?
Most people would say “no.”
Courts feel too ancient, too formal, too grounded in tradition to contain something as basic as a non-existent tribunal.
But legal systems are not held up by age or tradition.
They are held up by formal definitions — thin but rigid planks of statute and procedure.
When those planks are mis-specified, even slightly, the entire structure above becomes a rhetorical forest resting on a twig.
This essay explores the deepest category of that collapse: the infinivoid.
To understand it, we begin with the classic voids of administrative and public law, then travel to two very strange British locations — Bishop Rock and Morecambe Bay — which together define the boundary of what could ever be a court.
Beyond that boundary lies something stranger still.
1. The Classical Tiers of Voidness
Public law recognises several levels of nullity — each deeper than the last.
Tier 1 — Void (real court, unlawful act)
A valid, constituted court makes an error of law.
The decision is quashed.
Tier 2 — Supervoid (real court, unlawful sitting)
The court exists, but the bench or jurisdiction is defective.
The tribunal name parses; the sitting does not.
Tier 3 — Ultravoid (parses as a court, but cannot instantiate)
This is deeper.
A tribunal name may be syntactically perfect (“X Magistrates’ Court”) and refer to a real place.
Parliament could, in theory, designate it.
But the location cannot function as a court in reality.
To understand this boundary, we turn to two geographic curiosities.
For example, “Bishop Rock Magistrates’ Court” is a tribunal name that parses in English, yet cannot constitutionally instantiate because the rock has no civic infrastructure, no public access, and no safe place for a court to sit.
2. Bishop Rock — The Constitutional Cliff Edge
Bishop Rock is officially the westernmost point of England:
a granite skerry in the Atlantic topped by a single lighthouse.
It has:
no ground-level land,
no civic space,
no public entry,
no clerk’s office,
no lawful means of service,
no space for a bench,
and only a rooftop helicopter pad for access.
The name “Bishop Rock Magistrates’ Court” parses perfectly in English.
The rock is real.
Its coordinates are real.
Parliament could designate it by statutory order.
And yet:
a court cannot sit there,
the public cannot attend,
the press cannot observe,
documents cannot be served,
justice cannot be done,
and open justice cannot be satisfied.
Bishop Rock marks the outer boundary of legal possibility:
the last conceivable point at which a tribunal name can parse while still being constitutionally impossible.
This is the Bishop Rock Line.
3. Morecambe Bay — A Second Boundary Object
To make the boundary sharper, consider Morecambe Bay.
It is huge, mapped, real, and named.
But it is also a shifting tidal desert:
the ground moves,
channels reshape,
tides engulf the flats quickly,
there are no buildings,
no stable land,
no access roads,
and nowhere safe to gather or sit.
A “Morecambe Bay Magistrates’ Court” is grammatically tidy.
But it is constitutionally impossible.
Morecambe Bay is deceptively solid in appearance but treacherous beneath the surface — an ideal metaphor for tribunal names that parse grammatically but collapse constitutionally.
Bishop Rock and Morecambe Bay together show the limit of judicial ontology:
A place may be real without being capable of hosting a court.
Anything below the Bishop Rock Line cannot become a court
— even if the name looks like one.
Below that line lies the infinivoid.
4. Tier 4 — The Infinivoid
An infinivoid is not a tribunal that fails in practice.
It is a tribunal that fails in grammar.
It is a name that looks like a court
but does not correspond to anything recognisable in law.
A tribunal is infinivoid when:
the name is not a well-formed legal expression,
it is not a token within the statutory alphabet of courts,
it has no statutory creation,
it has no designated civic locus,
it is not a place a court could sit,
it is not a place a court ever has sat,
it cannot be found in any legal instrument,
and it cannot be retroactively cured or interpreted into existence.
An infinivoid is a pre-jurisdictional non-event.
A legal shape without legal substance.
A civic artefact — something shaped like a court, but not a court.
Administrative labels used only for internal workflow fall below this boundary line: uncreated by law, unanchorable in geography, and incapable of hosting justice.
5. Why an Infinivoid Cannot Be Repaired
Every lesser void can be fixed:
wrong date → amend
wrong bench → rehear
abolished courthouse → transfer
typo → correct
But an infinivoid cannot be repaired because:
there is no court to amend,
no tribunal to transfer from,
no bench to regularise,
no instrument to correct,
and no lawful object at the moment of service.
The failure is not procedural.
It is ontological — a mis-specification at the level of legal being.
Nothing in the system can turn an administrative fiction into a judicial entity.
6. The Ontological Woodpecker
Every formal system has one precise point where a tiny insight collapses the illusion:
Russell’s paradox did it for sets,
Gödel did it for logic,
Turing did it for computation,
Anisminic did it for administrative law.
The infinivoid is the same kind of fracture.
A single recognition —
“this tribunal name does not parse as a court”
— is the tap of a woodpecker’s beak on a hollow trunk.
Once seen, it cannot be unseen:
not by judges,
not by officials,
not by institutions,
not by the public.
The rhetorical forest collapses because its formal root is gone.
7. Conclusion: The Forest, the Line, and the Peck
Most of the time, courts are real things in real buildings.
But sometimes a tribunal name looks like a court while lacking every element of legal being.
Bishop Rock and Morecambe Bay mark the very edge of what could ever count as a court — places that parse in language but fail in constitutional reality.
Beyond that line lies the infinivoid:
names shaped like courts but never created by law, never capable of sitting, never capable of hosting justice.
Infinivoids do not test the limits of law; they reveal where law ends.
And once that fact is articulated —
once the ontological woodpecker finds the hollow trunk —
the entire rhetorical forest cannot pretend it is whole.
End of essay.
(Again: this essay discusses general legal principles, not any specific, live, or ongoing case.)