Institutional Actor Integrity Framework (IAIF): A Non-Normative Constitutional Specification of Actorhood

This work is a non-normative, non-operational constitutional specification defining the structural conditions under which actorhood is sufficient for institutional authority to bind. The Institutional Actor Integrity Framework (IAIF) does not address how identity is implemented, governed, authenticated, or managed. Instead, it specifies the invariants that must hold for an actor to exist in the constitutional sense—that is, for authority, obligation, responsibility, and consequence to meaningfully attach to a subject over time. The framework distinguishes actorhood from identity, recognition, representation, or technical attribution. It shows how modern institutional systems may continue to operate, decide, and enforce outcomes even as actorhood degrades through delegation, impersonation, replication, distribution, abstraction, and temporal decay. Where these conditions violate actor integrity, authority may persist operationally but is constitutionally absent. IAIF does not propose remedies, safeguards, governance models, controls, metrics, or implementation guidance. It does not define compliance requirements, certification criteria, or evaluative tests. Its purpose is boundary-setting rather than optimization: to define when authority can be said to exist, and when it cannot, irrespective of correctness, efficiency, regulatory alignment, or observed outcomes. The publication is jurisdiction-neutral and does not constitute legal advice. It forms the constitutional layer of a closed corpus on institutional authority in the digital era, constraining interpretive, stewardship, and adjudicative works without substituting for them. It is intended for courts, regulators, institutional leaders, and scholars concerned with legitimacy when systems continue to function but no actor can be produced to bear responsibility.