Burden-qualified contestable decisions

Scope

This note formalizes the narrow systems residue from the legal evidence/procedure audit: evidence state, authority, burden, procedure, decision, review, remedy, and finality remain distinct. The legal rules are jurisdiction- and date-bound; the transfer is an experiment contract, not a claim that adjudication is an optimizer or a truth oracle. Its evidence boundaries are C-679–C-704.

Decision record

For decision version $v$, retain

where $J$ is jurisdiction/rule authority, $A$ authorized decision-maker, $P$ parties or affected interests, $H$ claim and requested action, $B$ burden bearer, $S$ governing standard/decision rule, $R$ admitted record, $O$ objections and preserved issues, $Q$ disclosure/access/response state, $D$ disposition, $G$ stated grounds and reasons, $V$ review/remedy state, and $F$ finality/reopening conditions. These are typed fields, not commensurable scores.

For evidence item $i$,

where $a_i$ is artifact identity, $p_i$ proponent, $u_i$ permitted purpose, $c_i$ custody/provenance, $\alpha_i$ authentication ruling, $\delta_i$ admissibility ruling, $w_i$ weight or likelihood contribution, $h_i$ supported claim/scope, and $o_i$ objections/contrary evidence. Authentication does not imply content truth; admissibility does not imply weight; weight does not imply sufficiency; sufficiency does not grant authority.

Statistical and authority boundaries

For formal hypotheses $H_1,H_0$, the likelihood ratio

is dimensionless and depends on the evidence model. It is neither $p(H_1\mid e)$ nor a universal translation of a verbal proof standard. A decision threshold follows only after hypotheses, priors/evidence distributions, consequence vector, protected constraints, authority, and the decision rule are declared.

Keep the outcome vector visible:

where false positive/negative counts $N_{10},N_{01}$ are decisions, $T_{\mathrm{wrong}}$ is time under an incorrect or unauthorized effect in person-seconds or effect-seconds, $N_{\mathrm{process}}$ and $N_{\mathrm{protected}}$ are violation counts, $C$ is currency at a stated price year, $T_H$ human effort in person-seconds, $T_D$ elapsed delay in seconds, and $E$ lifecycle energy in joules. Protected procedure cannot be silently traded for mean accuracy through an unstated scalarization.

Review is selected and scoped

For $N_0$ first decisions, $N_A$ reviewed, and $N_R$ reversed/remanded,

Both are dimensionless. $r_R$ is not the first-stage error rate because issue preservation, selection into review, review standard, harmless/prejudice rule, remedy, settlement, and reviewer error intervene. A review record therefore binds the issue, record version, standard, permitted scope, identified error, prejudice rule, disposition, remedy, successor version, and later validity.

Falsification boundary

The held composition loses if typed workflow plus provenance, access control, calibrated selective prediction, rule/citation graphs, independent review, red-team challenge, conflict-of-interest controls, and full recomputation match its protected outcome–cost frontier. Reason text is not credited as faithful causal introspection; finality is not truth; reopening is not free rollback; and similarity to a prior decision does not establish applicable authority.