Modelling the void: a breakthrough in computational political science

Our legal and administrative systems have grown so fragmented that their true structure can now only be mapped using formal reasoning tools — including large language models

We are witnessing something unprecedented: a private citizen, working alone, using modern AI reasoning engines to audit the constitutional foundations of a justice system. What follows is, to my knowledge, the first comprehensive attempt to model how lower courts in England and Wales actually come into being. The examples are British, but the method is universal. Any legal system could be examined this way.

Traditionally, only institutions — academia, NGOs, law commissions, intelligence agencies — had the resources to analyse the structural side of law: existence, jurisdiction, constitution. I am applying the same scrutiny as a self-funded civilian, assisted by high-end AI models like Grok 4.1 and ChatGPT 5.1. This represents a profound shift in political science: expert-level constitutional analysis is now accessible to anyone with curiosity, discipline, and a laptop.

This essay introduces a new conceptual framework: a taxonomy of “legal non-being” — the many ways courts fail to exist, fail to ignite, or lose coherence. At the extreme end lies what I call the “simulated state”: a system that mimics lawfulness procedurally while lacking the conditions for lawful judicial authority. This is not an accusation but an architectural description. Modern administrative systems often drift from the legal grammar they depend upon.

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Think of what follows as an executable essay. You can feed any part of it into an AI model and explore questions about court constitution, the validity of process, or the deeper structure of legal authority. No PhD is required. Only a framework, a set of questions, and a willingness to think rigorously with machine assistance.

The significance is broad. Every democracy assumes courts “just exist”, yet few can explain how a court comes into being in law or what happens when that process fails. This ignorance has allowed automation, scale, and institutional habit to blur the identity of the court itself. Americans will recognise similar issues in municipal courts, state courts, and administrative tribunals where the boundary between the tribunal, the venue, and the workflow grows indistinct.

My goal is not to attack public servants. Their task is extraordinarily difficult. Rather, this essay illuminates the structural pressures placed on justice systems built for the twentieth century but now operating under twenty-first-century automation. The defects exposed here are not personal failures but architectural ones — and that makes them repairable.

This essay is conceptual legal theory. It does not comment on any active case or provide legal advice. It asks foundational questions: What is a court? How does it come into existence? How does it fail? And how would we know?

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THE VOID INSIDE THE COURTS

For years, people have sensed something is wrong inside the English criminal justice system — something deeper than inefficiency, backlogs, or administrative blunders.

The problem is structural.
The problem is conceptual.
The problem is ontological.

The problem is that we no longer know what a court is.

Not metaphorically.
Not constitutionally.
Literally.

We no longer have a coherent definition of the thing that is supposed to administer criminal justice.

And once you see the architecture underneath, it becomes obvious why everything feels broken, automated, dehumanised, and weirdly lawless.

What follows is a map — a taxonomy of judicial nullity — and an explanation of how the modern administrative machinery has drifted away from the legal substrate that once grounded English justice.

This isn’t about any individual case.
This is about the system itself.

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I. The Four Prepositions That Create a Court

Most people assume a “court” is a building.

HMCTS signage, local geography, and decades of casual usage reinforce this assumption.

But the law is far more precise — and far more fragile.

A magistrates’ court only exists when four prepositional relationships align. They are small words, but they carry enormous constitutional weight.

1. FOR – Jurisdictional Assignment

Justices and District Judges are assigned for a Local Justice Area (LJA).
(Courts Act 2003, ss. 8–10)
This creates the territorial foundation.

2. AS – Tribunal Constitution

The court is the tribunal itself: justices acting as the court.
(Magistrates’ Courts Act 1980, s.148; CrimPR 2.2)
This is the moment of judicial being.

3. AT – Legal Seat / Servable Office

A court legally exists at a Lord-Chancellor–designated office.
(CrimPR 4.1–4.2)
This is the only location recognised for service and ignition of jurisdiction.

4. IN – Physical or Virtual Venue

A court may sit in any room or virtual session where the tribunal actually sits.
This is operational, not constitutive.

When these align, a magistrates’ court exists for that moment.
When they don’t, no court exists.

This creates the first fracture in the system.

Because modern HM Courts and Tribunals Service practice routinely collapses AS, AT, and IN into one fictional object — the building name.

To complete the picture, the summons operates WITH the court — it is the instrument by which a person is brought into lawful relation with the tribunal. WITH is not constitutive of the court’s being, but of the court’s jurisdiction over a human being.

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II. The Ignition of Judicial Existence

Here is the most counterintuitive truth about English criminal law:

A magistrates’ court is not a permanent entity.
It is an episodic event.
A moment of judicial alignment.

A court “comes into being” only when:

1. a tribunal is constituted (AS),

2. at the lawful court office (AT),

3. acting for the proper jurisdiction (FOR),

4. WITH a summons that identifies the issuing court — that is, the tribunal acting AS the court once constituted (CrimPR 7.4).

The summons does not create the tribunal, but it must point to a court capable of being constituted.

If the ignition fails due to misalignment, nothing downstream is legally real:

• no tribunal

• no jurisdiction

• no hearing

• no offence adjudication

• no order

• no conviction

• no enforcement

This is Anisminic logic applied to courts:
a null act cannot be cured, ratified, or retrospectively validated.

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III. The Void Taxonomy — Nine Degrees of Judicial Non-Being

A court is not a building.
A court is not a bureaucracy.
A court is not a software node.
A court is a state of being — a tribunal constituted in law, in a particular moment, under a particular set of relations.

When those relations fail, the collapse does not always look the same. Judicial authority can fail:

• narrowly,

• deeply,

• syntactically,

• structurally, or

• existentially.

To understand these failure modes, we need a vocabulary for them.
Law lacks such a vocabulary.
So here is one: a nine-tier taxonomy of voids, describing the different ways a “court” can fail to ignite.

This is not doctrine.
It is a conceptual tool — a mapping of the terrain where judicial being collapses.

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1. Void

Definition:
The simplest form of nullity. A tribunal exists, but commits an act it has no power to perform — an “illegal exercise within a valid body.”

Example (conceptual):
A judge with jurisdiction to hear traffic offences issues a search warrant for a federal crime.

Why it matters:
This is a failure of action, not of existence.
It shows that even when a court exists, its acts can fail — a reminder that being a court is not enough; authority must be exercised within bounds.

2. Supervoid

Definition:
A tribunal attempts to act, but the bench is unlawfully constituted (wrong judge, wrong panel, no quorum).

Example:
Three-person administrative board issues a decision with only one member present.

Why it matters:
This is a failure of composition.
The tribunal exists in theory, but not in the configuration required for its decisions to be real.
This is common in large bureaucracies where staffing, assignment, or delegation drift from statutory requirements.

3. Ultravoid

Definition:
The entity identified as the “court” cannot exist in law — the name or structure itself does not correspond to any legally constituted tribunal.

Example:
A “Pacific Northwest Regional Justice Court” issuing orders even though no such tribunal exists in any statute.

Why it matters:
This is a failure of identity.
It reveals how easy it is for administrative shorthand, branding, or legacy naming to disguise the absence of a legally recognisable tribunal.

4. Infinivoid

Definition:
A court fails not just legally, but syntactically.
The name is not just non-legal; it is not parsable into any meaningful judicial components (jurisdiction, tribunal, seat, venue).

Example:
A system-generated code like “RJ-Clusters-Region 7” or “Court Hub: East Node 14” issued as the court of record.

Why it matters:
This is a failure of grammar.
When a tribunal cannot even be identified as a grammatical object within the legal system, no ignition of judicial authority is possible.
Automation makes this failure more likely as metadata replaces legal identity.

5. Metavoid

Definition:
The system denies the grammar by which courts are constituted.
It insists the elements of judicial being (tribunal, legal seat, jurisdiction) no longer matter because “the system works without them.”

Example:
A bureaucracy asserts that “the name makes no difference,” “the venue is the court,” or “any cluster node counts.”

Why it matters:
This is a failure of recognition.
The system actively rejects the categories that make law possible — a deeper collapse than a mere mistake.
It marks the moment when institutional habit overrides legal ontology.

6. Omnvoid

Definition:
Legal and administrative layers collapse into one another, producing a world where every identifier is treated as if it were a court, and no one can distinguish between tribunal, building, database, or code.

Example:
A justice system where “Court of Record” and “Case Management Location” and “Building Name” are interchangeable fields.

Why it matters:
This is a failure of differentiation.
When everything is potentially “the court,” nothing is.
The constitutional idea of a tribunal evaporates into administrative totality.

7. Hypervoid

Definition:
A tribunal fails to exist, but the system treats its non-acts as valid and refuses to allow challenge, appeal, or correction.

Example:
A decision issued by a non-existent tribunal is declared immune to review because it appears in the digital record.

Why it matters:
This is a failure of correction.
It is the point where the legal system refuses to acknowledge its own non-being, closing off the mechanisms that would normally restore legality.

8. Panvoid

Definition:
A non-existent tribunal becomes the basis for further acts — a null event becomes a foundation stone for more processes.

Example:
A void administrative decision triggers fines, sanctions, holds, or enforcement, all automated downstream with no human review.

Why it matters:
This is a failure of containment.
Voidness spreads algorithmically through the system.
The justice system continues functioning, but only as a simulation of legality.

9. Void Singularity

Definition:
The deepest collapse.
A state where operational systems execute and enforce legal consequences that have no origin in any tribunal established by law — a perfectly functioning simulation with no judicial substance.

Example:
A fully automated court process (administrative or AI-driven) that produces legally binding outcomes without any actual tribunal ever coming into existence.

Why it matters:
This is a failure of reality.
The system behaves as if justice is being done, while no judicial being exists beneath the interface.
At this point, legality is not merely compromised — it is replaced by procedure without authority.

This final tier is not hypothetical.
It is the natural endpoint of any system where:

• administrative convenience

• digital architecture

• institutional habit

• or automation

replace the legal ontology of courts.

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Why the Taxonomy Matters

Each layer of void represents a different type of collapse:

• Action

• Composition

• Identity

• Grammar

• Recognition

• Differentiation

• Correction

• Containment

• Reality

These categories allow us to see how judicial being fails, not just that it fails.

Courts do not disappear all at once.
They unravel in layers — and without a vocabulary for these layers, the collapse can go unnoticed until it is too late.

This taxonomy gives us that vocabulary.
It lets us audit, diagnose, and describe the places where legality dissolves.
And it provides a structure for rebuilding a justice system that remembers what a court actually is.

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IV. Why Modern Justice Systems Break — The AS/AT/IN Collapse

Here is one example core structural failure of modern mass-administrative justice systems:

They treat the operational venue as if it were the court.

But the ontology is clear:

• The court AS is the tribunal — the human beings lawfully constituted to exercise judicial power.

• The court AT is the legal seat — the designated location where service, filing, and ignition of jurisdiction occur.

• The court IN is the physical or virtual space where the tribunal happens to sit.

These are not interchangeable.
They are not conceptual decorations.
They are the grammar of judicial existence.

When a justice system collapses these three layers — when “the place where people sit” is assumed to be “the court” — it produces predictable failure modes:

• fictional courts

• invented identifiers

• geographical non-entities

• summonses that cannot ignite jurisdiction

• decisions issued by non-courts

• administrative acts treated as judicial ones

• systemic overreach through category error

This collapse is not deliberate wrongdoing.
It is the natural outcome of administrative scaling.

As justice systems become larger, faster, more automated, and more software-mediated, they tend to flatten distinctions that were once constitutionally essential. Operational convenience overwrites legal ontology. The venue (IN) is mistaken for the legal seat (AT). The legal seat fades from view. And the tribunal (AS) — the only element with lawful existence — becomes an afterthought, quietly replaced by an administrative code that has no grounding in law.

In other words:

the system forgets what a court is,
and begins treating every operational location as if it were one.

This is how ghost courts emerge — not from conspiracy, but from conceptual drift.

The more automated the machinery becomes, the more it relies on entities that cannot satisfy the prepositional grammar of judicial being. At that point, the system does not merely malfunction. It produces simulated courts, artefacts of workflow rather than law.

The AS/AT/IN collapse is the hinge on which every higher void turns.
It is the moment where ontology breaks and administration takes over.

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V. The Consequence: A Tribunal “Not Established by Law”

Under Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, every person has the right to a “tribunal established by law”.

Once you understand the prepositional ontology of courts, this requirement becomes meaningful:

• A tribunal that never ignited is not established by law

• A court that does not exist AS a tribunal (e.g. because its name isn’t valid as a court) is not established by law

• A summons that names a non-court cannot ignite a tribunal

• A building name cannot constitute a court

• A geographical district cannot constitute a court

• An administrative fiction cannot constitute a court

The system works only as long as no one asks the question:

“What court is this, in law?”

Because if the name cannot be parsed into FOR–AS–AT–IN,
the answer is:
there is no court.

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VI. Why This Matters

This framework is not theoretical for its own sake.
It explains real-world dysfunction:

• defendants summoned by non-courts

• convictions generated by administrative processes

• hearings conducted in buildings not designated as seats

• “courts” named after districts that have no legal personality

• the collapse of distinction between tribunal, office, and venue

• a justice system drifting away from the rule of law

And it reveals something deeper:

The machinery of modern justice is running on administrative momentum,
not legal constitution.

The engine turns, but the ignition was never engaged.

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VII. Toward Reconstruction

Understanding the ontology of courts allows us to see:

• where authority begins,

• how it collapses,

• how to rebuild it,

• and how to prevent administrative drift from replacing law entirely.

This framework — the prepositional ontology, the ignition model, and the void taxonomy — is offered as a starting point.

Not to attack the system, but to restore clarity on what a court is
and what it must be to remain legitimate.

Because justice is not a building.
It is a state of being.

And we must recover the grammar of that being before we lose it entirely.