Continuity Governance Specification: A Law-Bound Framework for Objective Integrity, Drift Detection, and Long-Horizon Stability

This record presents the Continuity Governance Specification, a law-bound framework for governing systems that operate under sustained uncertainty, entropy influx, and long-horizon consequences. The specification addresses a pervasive and under-acknowledged failure mode across domains including artificial intelligence, medicine, finance, infrastructure, and institutional decision-making: delayed structural failure under apparent short-term success. In such systems, surface-level indicators improve or remain stable while latent coherence degrades, leading to abrupt, irreversible collapse at a later stage. Rather than optimizing outcomes or prescribing values, the framework treats governance as a falsifiability and admissibility problem. Its core objective is not to ensure that decisions succeed, but to ensure that claims of stability, safety, or success remain structurally valid over time, independently of narrative justification, expert authority, or post-hoc reinterpretation. Key contributions include: A law-first continuity model governing coherence, drift, entropy influx, and irreversibility in open systems. A strict ontology separating latent structure, observables, estimators, and labels, preventing proxy substitution and metric laundering. An immutable, append-only audit substrate (ScarChain) supporting replayability, lineage preservation, and non-erasure of failure. Replay-based admissibility as the criterion for governance validity: decisions and claims are admissible if and only if they can be reconstructed and replayed under the same laws, assumptions, estimators, and horizons that governed them at decision time. GateCards, non-discretionary enforcement mechanisms that translate continuity laws into operational constraints, preventing silent drift, override normalization, and objective laundering. Objective Governance, which treats objectives themselves as continuity-critical inputs subject to provenance, authority, constraint, estimator compatibility, and horizon declaration. A self-governing oversight mechanism (Mirror Court) that governs governance itself, preventing meta-failure and institutional drift. Explicit escalation, enforcement, suspension, and termination rules that prioritize early, visible failure over late, catastrophic collapse. The specification is domain-agnostic and does not replace domain science, ethics, or policy judgment. Instead, it constrains how claims, objectives, metrics, and decisions are admitted into governance, ensuring that long-horizon systems fail lawfully and early rather than silently and late. This work is intended for researchers, practitioners, auditors, regulators, and system designers concerned with robustness, safety, and structural integrity in systems where outcomes alone are insufficient indicators of validity. Keywords continuity governance; drift detection; replayability; irreversibility; auditability; objective provenance; long-horizon systems; AI governance; structural failure; law-first systems