Kearon's Law of Record–Forced Temporal Order

Kearon’s Law of Record-Forced Temporal Order establishes that time is not a primitive assumption but a structural necessity. The law proves that any system capable of supporting stable, composable, and non-contradictory records must induce a strict partial precedence relation among events, and that this relation constitutes time itself. It further demonstrates that a directional arrow of time is not fundamental, but becomes uniquely identifiable if and only if an explicit asymmetry is present, including open system dynamics, coarse graining, or boundary constraints. The results are derived without assuming entropy increase, clocks, observers, or cosmological initial conditions. Quantum capacity bounds, relativistic locality constraints, and refinement stability are shown to act as forcing conditions on admissible temporal order. The law is structural, model independent, and formulated as a necessity theorem rather than a phenomenological principle.