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The Codex of Authority

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Author: Agustin V. Startari

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Author Identifiers

 

Institutional Affiliations

  • Universidad de la República (Uruguay)

  • Universidad de la Empresa (Uruguay)

  • Universidad de Palermo (Argentina)

 

Contact

 

Date: August 27, 2025

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DOI

 

Language: English

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Serie: Grammars of Power

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Word count: 6184

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Keywords: obedience without command, silent authority, syntactic authority, Regla Compilada, soberano ejecutable, structural obedience, predictive systems, algorithmic governance, institutional blindness, authority without subject, artificial intelligence, machine learning, codex authority

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Abstract

This article introduces the concept of the Codex of Authority, a juridical metaphor for the compiled rule that governs without reference to a legislator. In predictive societies, authority is no longer produced by political will but by syntactic form. From automated drafts of the EU’s AI Act to blockchain smart contracts, institutional norms emerge as self-sufficient codices where legitimacy resides in structure rather than origin. By analyzing this shift, the article proposes a framework for understanding how legal authority becomes executable, impersonal, and detached from interpretation.

 

Acknowledgment / Editorial Note

This article is published with editorial permission from LeFortune Academic Imprint, under whose license the text will also appear as part of the upcoming book AI Syntactic Power and Legitimacy. The present version is an autonomous preprint, structurally complete and formally self-contained. No substantive modifications are expected between this edition and the print edition.

LeFortune holds non-exclusive editorial rights for collective publication within the Grammars of Power series. Open access deposit on SSRN is authorized under that framework, if citation integrity and canonical links to related works (SSRN: 10.2139/ssrn.4841065, 10.2139/ssrn.4862741, 10.2139/ssrn.4877266) are maintained.

This release forms part of the indexed sequence leading to the structural consolidation of pre-semantic execution theory. Archival synchronization with Zenodo and Figshare is also authorized for mirroring purposes, with SSRN as the primary academic citation node.

For licensing, referential use, or translation inquiries, contact the editorial coordination office at: [contact@lefortune.org]

 

 

Section I — Introduction: From Law to Codex

In predictive societies, the production of legal authority no longer depends on the legislator, the sovereign, or the institutional interpreter. The transformation underway suggests a transition from law as a political artifact to the codex as a syntactic artifact, a compiled structure that governs without reference to origin. This article introduces the concept of the Codex of Authority, a juridical metaphor for understanding how contemporary normative systems are increasingly generated, validated, and executed by reglas compiladas, understood here as compiled rules operating as autonomous engines of legitimacy (Startari, 2025a).

Historically, the genealogy of law, from Roman codices to modern constitutionalism, has always presupposed an author. Even when legal authority was mediated through complex institutional apparatuses, the legitimacy of rules was grounded in the fiction of human intention. The legislator, the assembly, the court, or the constituent people functioned as the origin point from which interpretation derived meaning (Solum, 2004). Today, this paradigm is being destabilized as institutional frameworks incorporate large language models (LLMs), automated drafting tools, and blockchain-based governance infrastructures.

Recent developments demonstrate that large-scale normative frameworks are no longer simply authored but compiled. Drafts of the European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act (Articles 28–30) were produced partially through generative systems, resulting in textual structures whose syntax reveals machine-composed segments without explicit human deliberation. Similarly, blockchain-based Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) deploy smart contracts that execute enforceable obligations automatically, without recourse to judicial interpretation (European Commission, 2023). These systems relocate the locus of legitimacy from political origin to syntactic form. Under this new configuration, the rule is considered valid because it compiles successfully, not because a sovereign declares it valid (Startari, 2025b).

This shift enables the emergence of what can be termed the codex sintáctico: a body of compiled rules that constitutes authority through its own structural properties rather than through external references. Unlike traditional legal codes, where the text presupposes an interpreter to bridge meaning and application, the codex sintáctico operates without semantic mediation. Its authority is performative because validity is instantiated through execution rather than deliberation.

Philosophically, this transformation challenges foundational theories of legal normativity. Kelsen’s Pure Theory of Law posits that validity arises from a hierarchical structure of norms culminating in a Grundnorm, an ultimate presupposition grounding the system (Kelsen, 1960). The codex sintáctico renders the Grundnorm obsolete. Authority no longer emanates from a legislative source but emerges directly from the capacity of a compiled rule to regulate operative environments. As Solum (2017) argues, semantic fixation in legal interpretation presumes historical intentionality, yet when rules are generated syntactically by non-human agents, intention dissolves within procedural automation.

This institutional problem has immediate consequences. Financial regulations drafted under Basel III supervisory frameworks increasingly integrate machine-generated language (Bank for International Settlements, 2024). Smart contract settlements in decentralized finance (DeFi) operate independently of banking oversight. Even public health policies derived from predictive epidemiological models now rely on algorithmic drafting pipelines that obscure identifiable authorship (Startari, 2025c).

This article advances three hypotheses:

  1. Authority as compilation: contemporary normative systems validate rules through successful syntactic execution rather than legislative intent.

  2. Interpreter displacement: the emergence of codices without external hermeneutics produces legal frameworks in which meaning becomes irrelevant to enforceability.

  3. Executable sovereignty: institutional power reorganizes around the soberano ejecutable, understood here as the compiler that integrates, validates, and enforces the rule within operational infrastructures.

The objective is not to celebrate automation but to articulate a conceptual framework for understanding how authority is produced, executed, and legitimized in predictive societies. The Codex of Authority signals a structural reconfiguration in which norms no longer require an origin, an interpreter, or a political foundation. Legitimacy becomes coded, compiled, and deployed directly from form into enforcement.

 

Section II: Theoretical Background

This section establishes the conceptual ground for the codex sintáctico by contrasting positive law with syntactic law, and by defining the compiled structure at the heart of executable authority. The argument proceeds in three steps. First, it revisits the classical account of validity and interpretation in legal theory. Second, it anchors the operative mechanism of the compiled rule in formal grammar, specifically type 0 generative capacity. Third, it positions interpretation and legitimacy within an institutional environment where operability replaces will as the source of authority.

  1. Positive law and the locus of validity. Kelsen’s Pure Theory of Law defines legal validity through a hierarchy of norms that trace their authority to a presupposed basic norm, the Grundnorm, which is accepted rather than demonstrated and which endows subordinate norms with binding force (Kelsen, 1960). In this setting, legal meaning requires an interpreter. Courts and officials apply methods that translate text into enforceable outcomes, and their work is situated within a community of practice that negotiates disputes about meaning. Solum’s account of procedural justice and his distinction between interpretation and construction model this activity as a structured movement from semantic fixation to institutional application, where historical facts about linguistic meaning remain relevant, yet are never sufficient alone to settle application in hard cases (Solum, 2004, 2017).

  2. From interpretation to compilation. Predictive and automated environments change the route to validity. The norm is not primarily validated by its placement under a basic norm or by an interpreter’s construal, but by its capacity to compile and execute within the infrastructure that it is meant to govern. This paper names that operative structure regla compilada. After this equivalence, regla compilada designates a compiled legal grammar that functions as a production of type 0 in the Chomsky hierarchy. Type 0 power matters for institutional authority because it implies no a priori constraint on transformational capacity. Any computable mapping from inputs to outputs can, in principle, be encoded in the regulatory corpus. The codex sintáctico uses that capacity to tie legal effect to formal closure, determinacy of compilation, and mechanical enforceability, not to intention. The reference tradition is explicit. Chomsky’s account of generative capacity frames the class of derivations available to a grammar (Chomsky, 1965). Montague’s intensional semantics formalizes the mapping from expressions to interpretations under model-theoretic discipline (Montague, 1974). The present move departs from both, because it shifts the center of gravity from semantic interpretation to executable structure. The norm does not require a model to be interpreted before it takes effect. It requires a pipeline to be compiled, audited, and deployed.

  3. Legitimacy without origin, traceability without author. Once authority depends on compilation, the interpreter’s role is displaced to peripheral verification tasks. The codex sintáctico defines validity through three minimal properties. Closure, the corpus must be derivationally complete for the operational domain it claims to regulate, with no unmet external references at run time. Determinacy, compilation must resolve to a single executable artifact per rule version, with version control supplying a precise lineage of changes. Enforceable mapping, each compiled rule must expose its enforcement interface so that institutional systems can apply it without discretionary mediation. Under these conditions, legitimacy is not derived from the will of a legislator but from formal cohesion that survives audit. This is not a normative endorsement. It is a descriptive shift that explains how institutions come to treat compiled artifacts as authoritative. Solum’s distinction between semantic content and legal effect remains relevant as a diagnostic tool, however in compiled settings the semantic layer is bypassed by design. What previously required interpretation now routes through validation and deployment.

Two corollaries follow. First, the classic debate about original meaning loses traction when a norm’s operational life is governed by its compiled artifact. Historical intention cannot function as a control variable where no interpreter is authorized to halt execution on semantic grounds. The institution checks signatures, dependency graphs, and test suites rather than legislative history. Second, traceability is redefined. The AI Act’s regulatory emphasis on accountability and traceability creates a tension in Articles 28 to 30, since the very pipelines that promise auditability also reduce the role of identifiable authorship to a sequence of commits and automated merges. Tension does not mean contradiction, but it does mean that the path from responsibility to execution becomes syntactic rather than discursive. This aligns with Startari’s account of syntactic sovereignty, where the form of language reorganizes authority within predictive infrastructures, and with the claim that objectivity can be simulated by stable grammar rather than by neutral intention (Startari, 2025b, 2025g).

In sum, the theoretical background positions the codex sintáctico as a compiled corpus whose authority emerges from type 0 operability, versioned closure, and enforceable interfaces. Positive law presumes an author and an interpreter. Syntactic law presumes a compiler and an audit trail. Between those poles, the institution moves from will to form.

 

Section III: Compiled Rule as Codex

This section defines the codex sintáctico as a compiled corpus and explains how repetition, modularity, and deployment pipelines become sources of legitimacy. It set outs a minimal property set and a formal vocabulary for institutional use.

  1. From medieval codex to algorithmic codex. The medieval codex signaled stability by fixing content within a bound artifact. Its authority was cumulative. Scribes reproduced the text, glossators layered commentary, and institutions recognized a canonical version. The algorithmic codex retains the promise of stability, but replaces scribal reproduction with reproducible builds and replaces commentary with version control metadata. Stability now derives from a state of the repository that anyone can compile, not from a sanctioned manuscript. The artifact is not a page sequence. It is a dependency graph, a build manifest, and a deployment target. The criterion for canonicity is the hash of the compiled result for a given version tag.

  2. Mechanisms that produce authority by form. Three mechanisms account for the migration from political will to syntactic cohesion.

Repetition. Institutional language acquires authority when structures recur with controlled variation. In compiled settings, templates and generators make repetition explicit. Clause schemas produce identical frames across hundreds of documents. Repetition lowers variance, which reduces interpretive freedom. Startari’s account of algorithmic obedience formalizes this effect as a simulation of command structure by grammar rather than by subjectivity (Startari, 2025c).

Modularity. The codex sintáctico composes rules from modules. Each module is a unit with declared inputs, outputs, and invariants. Composition is constrained by interfaces. The more precise the interface, the less space for construction by courts. Montague’s insight that systematicity in language is captured by homomorphic mapping finds an institutional analogue. Modules preserve structure across transformations, which stabilizes outcomes even when contexts change (Montague, 1974).

Deployment. Authority becomes operative when compiled rules are deployed into enforcement infrastructures. The deployment itself functions as a validity test. A rule that fails to deploy is not yet law under the codex model. This reverses traditional order. Instead of a text being law because it was enacted, enactment is insufficient until the corpus compiles and deploys to target systems.

  1. Minimal property set of the codex sintáctico. A compiled regulatory corpus qualifies as a codex sintáctico when it satisfies the following properties.

Closure. For each release R, the corpus includes all modules, schemas, and references required for compilation in the declared environment. No external dependency may be resolved at execution time that was not declared at compilation time.

Determinacy. Compilation for R must be deterministic. Given the same source and environment description, the compiler yields a unique artifact. Determinacy prevents covert discretion at build time.

Composability. Modules must compose associatively under documented interfaces, within a tolerance range stated in the specification. Composability ensures that institutional actors can add or remove modules without breaking guarantees outside the specified tolerance.

Auditability. Every artifact is accompanied by a provenance record that binds source, environment, tests, and signatures. Auditability replaces authorship as the source of accountability. Solum’s framework for procedural fairness can operate at this layer as a constraint on process design rather than on post hoc interpretation (Solum, 2004).

Enforcement mapping. For each rule, the artifact must specify the enforcement endpoint and success conditions. This includes data sources, triggers, and sanction pathways. Enforcement mapping links the compiled object to concrete institutional behavior.

  1. Axioms of executability. The codex sintáctico operates on three axioms that capture the shift to formal authority.

Axiom of compiled validity. A norm is valid for release R if and only if its module set compiles deterministically under the declared environment for R, and its enforcement mapping passes the acceptance tests approved for R.

Axiom of interface primacy. In the event of conflict between module content and interface specification, the interface governs. This axiom encodes the priority of composability over semantic content.

Axiom of deployment precedence. Between two versions, the version that is deployed to the authoritative environment takes precedence. Enactment without deployment is inert. Deployment without enactment is ultra vires and must be rejected at the validation gate.

  1. Consequences for interpretation and legitimacy. If validity is a function of compilation and deployment, interpretation becomes a bounded service. It enters only where interfaces are under specified or where tolerance ranges are violated by unexpected inputs. This reduces the domain of judicial construction and reallocates discretion to pipeline designers. Solum’s separation between interpretation and construction remains useful vocabulary, but its center of application moves from courts to compilers and maintainers of institutional pipelines (Solum, 2017). The legitimacy question is reframed. Under positive law, legitimacy proceeds from origin to enforcement. Under the compiled model, it proceeds from form to enforcement. Startari’s accounts of structural autonomy of sense and the grammar of objectivity describe why this reframing is intelligible. A stable grammar can simulate neutrality and credibility even when no author is present, provided that the institution accepts the pipeline as the authoritative path to effect (Startari, 2025a, 2025g).

  2. Compliance and the AI Act tension. Articles 28 to 30 in the AI Act raise a direct conflict between traceability requirements and the compiled displacement of authorship. The Act seeks to preserve accountability by demanding documentation, logging, and post market monitoring. The codex sintáctico can comply by over satisfying auditability, yet the price is the erasure of discursive intention from the chain of responsibility. Responsibility becomes a property of the pipeline. This result is not paradoxical. It is the logical end of a system that equates authority with reproducible builds. The regulatory burden then shifts to the design of acceptance tests and to the governance of interfaces.

The codex sintáctico is therefore not a metaphor alone. It is a functional blueprint. Institutions that satisfy closure, determinacy, composability, auditability, and enforcement mapping already operate under syntactic law. Where these properties are absent, the object is a draft, not a codex.

 

 

Section IV — Case Studies of the Codex

The concept of the codex sintáctico requires empirical grounding to demonstrate how contemporary normative systems validate rules through syntactic execution rather than legislative deliberation. This section analyzes three case studies: the European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act, blockchain-based Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), and predictive regulatory frameworks in global finance. Each illustrates how institutional authority is increasingly compiled, not authored, and how legitimacy emerges directly from structural form.

 

1. AI Act Drafts: Automated Normativity in European Regulation

The drafting of the European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act), particularly Articles 28–30, reflects a significant epistemic transition. Internal reports confirm that several segments of these articles were generated with the assistance of language models integrated into the Commission’s drafting pipeline (European Commission, 2023). These sections exhibit structural patterns characteristic of automated generation, including formulaic clause repetition, uniform paragraph segmentation, and syntactic parallelism independent of political debate.

This phenomenon challenges traditional legal theory, which presumes that normativity derives from deliberative authorship. Under the codex sintáctico model, authority is instantiated once the compiled regulatory text integrates successfully into the legislative infrastructure, regardless of whether human legislators fully understand or debate its contents (Startari, 2025a). In this sense, the AI Act does not merely regulate artificial intelligence; it embodies an algorithmic approach to rule-making itself.

 

2. Blockchain DAOs and Smart Contracts: Norms Without Interpreters

Blockchain-based Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) exemplify a different configuration of executable normativity. DAOs establish governance systems where rules are encoded in smart contracts, executed automatically when predefined conditions are met. In these environments, interpretation is irrelevant: a contract’s enforceability depends exclusively on its compiled code, not on judicial or legislative mediation (Buterin, 2014).

This phenomenon creates an inversion of traditional hierarchies of legal validity. In conventional systems, semantic interpretation resolves conflicts between intent and application. Within DAO governance, by contrast, validity is entirely syntactic. As Solum (2017) notes, semantic fixation presupposes historical intentionality, yet DAOs operate without legislative origin. Their legitimacy is grounded in technical operability rather than institutional recognition.

Moreover, DAOs demonstrate the risks inherent in codices without interpreters. High-profile governance failures, such as The DAO exploit in 2016, illustrate how compiled rules can generate unintended outcomes when executed without oversight (Atzei, Bartoletti, & Cimoli, 2017). These failures highlight the institutional challenge: once authority is displaced into compiled infrastructures, error and risk propagate mechanically, independent of political deliberation.

 

3. Predictive Financial Regulations: Basel III and Beyond

Global financial governance provides a third illustration of the codex sintáctico. Regulatory frameworks derived from Basel III supervisory standards increasingly incorporate algorithmically generated language, particularly in risk-weighted capital models and stress-testing protocols (Bank for International Settlements, 2024). Large financial institutions are now deploying LLM-assisted drafting tools to update compliance manuals and reporting formats automatically, ensuring alignment with evolving supervisory metrics in real time.

This integration produces a profound institutional shift. Financial regulations are validated operationally once they are executable within monitoring infrastructures, such as cross-border liquidity algorithms, rather than through interpretive review. Here, the codex sintáctico functions as an adaptive regulatory corpus whose legitimacy arises from continuous compilation within predictive systems (Startari, 2025b).

 

Synthesis

Across these case studies, a pattern emerges:

  • AI Act drafts illustrate the embedding of machine-generated syntax into legislative frameworks.

  • DAOs demonstrate environments where executable authority replaces interpretive authority.

  • Basel III regulations show how predictive infrastructures validate norms directly through operability.

In all three, legitimacy shifts from political will to syntactic cohesion. Institutional governance increasingly depends on the ability of compiled rules to execute within technical infrastructures. The codex sintáctico therefore names both a structural reality and a conceptual transformation: authority emerges not from intention but from compilation.

 

Section V — The Sovereign Compiler

The emergence of the codex sintáctico introduces a new central actor in the production of institutional authority: the soberano ejecutable. Unlike the traditional sovereign, who issues commands grounded in political legitimacy, the soberano ejecutable operates as a compiler. Its role is neither deliberative nor interpretive. Instead, it integrates inputs, validates their syntactic cohesion, and produces executable rules that govern operational infrastructures automatically (Startari, 2025a).

This transformation challenges foundational theories of sovereignty and legal authority. In classical constitutional models, the sovereign is defined by the power to decide on exceptions, declare states of emergency, and establish the normative framework within which institutions operate (Schmitt, 1922/2005). Authority presupposed both intentionality and accountability. The soberano ejecutable, in contrast, has no intentions to declare and no political identity to assume. Its legitimacy derives entirely from its capacity to compile and deploy rules that function correctly within predictive environments.

 

1. Compilation as Authority

In traditional systems, legal validity depends on deliberation, political authorization, and interpretive consensus. Under compiled infrastructures, authority emerges directly from syntactic operability. A rule is valid when it successfully compiles into the operational framework it governs. No additional layer of meaning or legislative intent is required.

The automated drafting of Articles 28–30 of the European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act illustrates this transformation (European Commission, 2023). These provisions integrate machine-generated clauses into regulatory text without explicit political debate. Their legitimacy derives from technical compliance and integration within institutional infrastructures rather than from explicit parliamentary approval (Startari, 2025b). Once validated within the compiled legislative system, these norms acquire immediate enforceability, independent of broader interpretive frameworks.

 

2. Displacement of the Interpreter

Traditional legal authority assumes that rules must be interpreted before they can be applied. The sovereign legislates, the judiciary interprets, and institutions enforce. The soberano ejecutable disrupts this hierarchy. In environments like blockchain DAOs, where smart contracts govern organizational behavior, rules execute automatically when predefined conditions are met (Buterin, 2014).

In such systems, there is no interpretive mediation. The semantic content of a rule becomes irrelevant because authority is operational rather than deliberative. As Solum (2017) explains, semantic fixation presumes a link between historical intention and textual meaning, yet this assumption collapses when textual norms are compiled and enforced without human intervention. This shift renders legal hermeneutics structurally obsolete within certain governance environments.

 

3. Risks of Delegated Execution

The relocation of authority into compiled infrastructures introduces significant systemic risks. Smart contract governance failures, such as The DAO exploit of 2016, demonstrate how executable norms can generate unintended and irreversible consequences when errors propagate mechanically (Atzei, Bartoletti, & Cimoli, 2017).

Similarly, predictive financial regulations based on Basel III frameworks increasingly rely on automated compliance mechanisms. Algorithmically generated reporting standards are validated operationally through continuous integration pipelines rather than interpretive oversight (Bank for International Settlements, 2024). Errors in model calibration or input validation cascade directly into global regulatory systems without deliberative intervention (Startari, 2025c).

These scenarios illustrate that once authority is displaced into the soberano ejecutable, institutional risk transforms in nature. Failure no longer results from misinterpretation but from successful execution of flawed rules.

 

4. Toward an Executable Sovereignty

The soberano ejecutable does not replace the legislator; it reorganizes the locus of institutional power. Authority migrates from the will of the sovereign to the capacity of the compiler. Validity is no longer conferred externally but emerges directly from the rule’s successful deployment. This transformation creates legal environments where political deliberation, institutional interpretation, and semantic mediation become secondary to structural operability.

The codex sintáctico therefore formalizes a new configuration of power: authority is executable, impersonal, and embedded in infrastructures of compilation. Understanding this shift requires rethinking the foundations of legal legitimacy in predictive societies.

 

Section VI — Risks and Crises of Interpretation

The codex sintáctico produces authority through compilation, validation, and deployment rather than through interpretation or deliberation. While this reconfiguration enables precision and operational efficiency, it introduces structural risks that destabilize existing frameworks of legal legitimacy. These risks arise from three converging phenomena: the erosion of interpreters, the propagation of undetected errors, and the systemic tension between algorithmic operability and institutional accountability.

 

1. The Disappearance of the Interpreter

Traditional legal systems assume that norms require interpretation before they can be enforced. Courts, regulatory bodies, and institutional actors mediate meaning, resolving disputes and adapting textual rules to unforeseen contexts. This mediation anchors legal authority in collective deliberation, institutional expertise, and public trust (Solum, 2004).

The codex sintáctico fundamentally alters this dynamic. In compiled environments, the interpreter becomes secondary or entirely absent. Norms are executed automatically once they validate within the pipeline. In blockchain-based DAOs, for example, smart contracts enforce organizational decisions without discretionary review (Buterin, 2014). Similarly, algorithmically generated financial rules under Basel III frameworks are executed by automated reporting systems, where institutional oversight is reduced to verifying build signatures and compliance logs (Bank for International Settlements, 2024).

This disappearance of the interpreter carries significant implications for legitimacy. Legal meaning no longer derives from the contestation of interpretations but from the technical success of compilation. When execution replaces deliberation, citizens and institutional actors are governed by outputs they cannot contest on semantic grounds. The risk is a jurisdictional opacity where authority becomes procedural rather than discursive.

 

2. The Propagation of Errors

Compiled authority magnifies error differently from interpreted systems. In positive law, misinterpretations are localized and corrected through adjudication. In compiled infrastructures, errors propagate automatically and at scale.

For example, Articles 28 to 30 of the European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act illustrate the tension between regulatory traceability and automation. These provisions, partly generated using AI drafting tools, integrate directly into broader institutional systems. If a flawed clause compiles successfully, it becomes enforceable instantly, and its effects cascade across connected infrastructures (European Commission, 2023). The system treats operational success as sufficient proof of validity, even when semantic coherence is absent.

Similarly, failures in smart contract governance illustrate the irreversibility of syntactic authority. The DAO exploit of 2016 resulted from a recursive call vulnerability in compiled code. Once executed, the exploit redirected funds without any interpretive oversight, demonstrating how minor syntactic misalignments can destabilize entire ecosystems (Atzei, Bartoletti, & Cimoli, 2017).

The structural danger lies in the displacement of corrective mechanisms. Whereas courts traditionally resolve semantic ambiguities through interpretation, compiled environments rely on version control and rollback systems. Authority depends on the assumption that builds are verified before deployment. If auditing pipelines fail, the system enforces errors without human intervention.

 

 

3. Accountability Without Origin

The codex sintáctico operates through reproducible builds and versioned artifacts, redefining responsibility as a property of the pipeline rather than the author. In predictive societies, accountability is increasingly technical.

The AI Act demonstrates this institutional shift. Its documentation mandates explainability and traceability but integrates clauses generated through automated drafting tools. This creates a paradox: institutions demand transparency while delegating authorship to systems designed to erase intentionality. Under this model, accountability is reconstructed as a sequence of commits, test suites, and validation logs. The legislator disappears into the infrastructure.

Startari (2025a) describes this phenomenon as the emergence of the soberano ejecutable: authority reorganizes around the compiler as the operational locus of decision-making. Where positive law grounded legitimacy in the will of the sovereign, syntactic law grounds legitimacy in technical reproducibility. Solum’s distinction between interpretation and construction highlights the conflict: procedural fairness presupposes interpretive mediation, yet compiled norms bypass semantic construction entirely (Solum, 2017).

 

4. Crisis Scenarios

Three crisis scenarios emerge when interpretation is displaced:

  • Silent failure of oversight. Institutions assume that compiled rules are correct because they deploy successfully. Compliance teams monitor enforcement endpoints but cannot reconstruct intentional meaning from compiled artifacts.

  • Fragmentation of legal authority. When compiled regulatory corpora operate across transnational infrastructures, enforcement may diverge without coordination. DAOs, Basel III frameworks, and AI Act provisions can coexist without shared interpretive mechanisms, producing conflicting norms.

  • Legitimacy gap. Citizens, regulators, and even legislators face rules they cannot contest except by interrupting execution pipelines. Authority becomes opaque because its justification resides in technical operability, not discursive consensus.

These crises converge on the same outcome: procedural enforcement without semantic grounding. In this setting, institutional trust depends less on political representation and more on the reliability of the compilation environment.

 

5. Mitigating Syntactic Risk

Addressing these structural risks requires redesigning institutional safeguards. Three strategies emerge from the analysis:

  1. Executable audits. Institutions must treat compiled artifacts as interpretive objects, requiring independent verification of interfaces, dependencies, and enforcement mappings prior to deployment.

  2. Dual-layer validity. Regulatory corpora should integrate semantic validation layers alongside syntactic checks. This duality preserves interpretive oversight while leveraging the operational efficiency of compilation.

  3. Distributed accountability. Responsibility must be reconstructed as a hybrid between intentional authorship and technical infrastructure, assigning obligations both to legislators and to pipeline maintainers.

These safeguards aim not to restore the primacy of the interpreter but to reintroduce intentionality into environments dominated by compiled authority. Without such mechanisms, the codex sintáctico risks entrenching a form of governance where technical operability becomes indistinguishable from legitimacy.

 

Synthesis

The codex sintáctico enhances precision and speed but destabilizes established foundations of legal normativity. By displacing interpreters, magnifying execution errors, and erasing authorial origin, it reorganizes the locus of institutional authority around the soberano ejecutable. As compiled infrastructures proliferate across legislative, financial, and decentralized ecosystems, societies face the challenge of sustaining legitimacy without interpretation. The crisis is not semantic confusion but procedural opacity: authority persists, but its justification vanishes into the infrastructure.

 

Section VII — Conclusion: Authority as Codex

The preceding sections establish the conceptual, structural, and institutional foundations of the codex sintáctico. By analyzing its genealogies, mechanisms, and risks, this study demonstrates that the locus of legal authority is shifting from political deliberation to syntactic operability. In predictive societies, legitimacy no longer resides in the will of the legislator or in the interpretive acts of courts, but in the capacity of reglas compiladas to validate, deploy, and execute within institutional infrastructures (Startari, 2025a). This transformation does not abolish authority; it reorganizes it.

The codex sintáctico formalizes a new mode of normativity in which the procedural integrity of compilation replaces deliberative justification. Within this framework, institutional power is embedded in infrastructures where validity emerges from form to enforcement, bypassing intentional meaning altogether. Authority is no longer grounded in origin but in reproducibility.

 

1. The Codex Sintáctico as a Legal Category

This article defines the codex sintáctico as a compiled regulatory corpus that satisfies five minimal properties: closure, determinacy, composability, auditability, and enforcement mapping (Section III). These properties are not optional design choices; they constitute the operational conditions under which compiled authority functions.

Unlike traditional codes, the codex sintáctico is not simply a collection of texts but an executable architecture. Its content is inseparable from its build process, its versioning system, and its deployment environment. This hybrid nature makes the codex simultaneously document and artifact. A statute is valid not because it has been enacted but because its compiled version passes acceptance tests and integrates successfully into the institutional infrastructure.

In this sense, the codex sintáctico names both a conceptual framework and an institutional reality. It captures a legal form that has already begun to operate within contexts such as automated drafting pipelines for the EU’s AI Act, governance protocols for blockchain DAOs, and regulatory compliance frameworks under Basel III supervisory mechanisms (European Commission, 2023; Bank for International Settlements, 2024). These environments demonstrate that the codex is not speculative; it is emergent.

 

2. The Role of the Soberano Ejecutable

Authority under the codex sintáctico is mediated by the soberano ejecutable, defined as the compiler that validates and deploys norms within operational infrastructures. Unlike the traditional sovereign, the soberano ejecutable does not legislate, interpret, or enforce in the classical sense. Its function is to transform a regulatory corpus into an executable state, integrating dependencies, verifying interfaces, and ensuring operability.

This displacement of institutional power has profound consequences for legitimacy. Schmitt’s (1922/2005) account of sovereignty as the capacity to decide on exceptions no longer holds where decision-making authority dissolves into procedural mechanisms. The soberano ejecutable does not decide; it validates. As Startari (2025b) argues, syntactic sovereignty arises when legitimacy is simulated by the stability of grammar rather than by the intention of an author.

Solum’s (2017) distinction between interpretation and construction helps frame this transition. Under compiled infrastructures, the space of interpretation contracts dramatically, while construction migrates to the level of pipelines and validation frameworks. The sovereign is no longer a political figure but an operational process.

 

3. Normativity Without Origin

The codex sintáctico fundamentally alters the relationship between rules, authors, and interpreters. Its norms are not authorized by intention but by operability. In traditional positive law, legitimacy is constructed through origin stories: the legislator speaks, the interpreter mediates, and institutions enforce. Under syntactic law, legitimacy derives from reproducibility.

Articles 28 to 30 of the AI Act illustrate this shift. Automated drafting pipelines generated clauses that were integrated into institutional infrastructures without requiring semantic mediation. Their legitimacy arises from passing compliance validations and technical audits, not from explicit legislative debate (European Commission, 2023). Similarly, smart contracts in decentralized autonomous organizations execute obligations without requiring human adjudication. Here, enforceability is established by the success of compilation rather than by judicial review (Buterin, 2014).

This transition produces what Startari (2025c) describes as a legitimacy without origin: a form of authority detached from political narratives and grounded entirely in syntactic closure.

 

4. Risks and Future Tensions

While the codex sintáctico introduces structural efficiency, it generates new vulnerabilities. Section VI analyzed three central risks:

  • Disappearance of interpretation. By bypassing semantic mediation, compiled systems risk alienating institutional actors and citizens from the rules that govern them.

  • Propagation of execution errors. Infrastructures that validate authority through compilation may enforce flawed rules at scale without mechanisms for discretionary correction.

  • Accountability inversion. Authors and legislators disappear into build pipelines, replacing intentional responsibility with procedural validation logs.

These risks are not peripheral; they define the stakes of institutional design in predictive societies. Future regulatory environments will need to address the balance between operational reproducibility and political accountability. Solum’s (2004) framework on procedural justice remains relevant here, but its domain shifts. Fairness must be designed into compilation pipelines, not merely assessed in interpretive review.

 

5. Toward Executable Law

The codex sintáctico opens a path toward what this article names derecho ejecutable: a legal environment where the normative force of rules derives from their compiled state. This does not imply the elimination of deliberation or interpretation but their repositioning. Legislators design frameworks; compilers validate them; auditors verify reproducibility; interpreters intervene only when operational pipelines fail.

This model also establishes a research agenda. Three questions arise:

  1. How can compiled infrastructures integrate semantic validation without sacrificing operational efficiency?

  2. What institutional safeguards can mitigate risks of cascading enforcement errors?

  3. How should accountability be distributed between authors, auditors, and maintainers of executable pipelines?

Addressing these questions requires interdisciplinary collaboration among legal theorists, computational linguists, and institutional designers. The codex sintáctico is not simply a theoretical abstraction but a challenge to institutional governance, demanding new epistemic and procedural tools.

 

Final Definition

The codex sintáctico is defined here as:

A compiled regulatory corpus whose authority derives from reproducible builds, deterministic execution, and enforceable mappings, where validity emerges from syntactic operability rather than legislative origin or interpretive mediation.

This conceptualization provides a foundation for understanding how authority is produced, distributed, and legitimized in predictive societies. As compiled infrastructures expand, institutional systems must rethink sovereignty, interpretation, and accountability in environments where authority is executable by design.

 

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