Continuity Before Authority: A Constitutional Doctrine of Sovereign Provenance and Logical Sovereignty

Continuity Before Authority is a non-normative, non-operational constitutional doctrine examining the conditions under which institutional authority may legitimately persist across time, substitution, authorship loss, and reasoning delegation. The doctrine establishes that authority collapses when it cannot preserve sovereign continuity of memory and reasoning, even where systems remain operational, outcomes remain correct, or institutional structures persist. It distinguishes continuity of authority from continuity of operation, and rejects persistence, performance, explanation, or narrative coherence as substitutes for constitutional legitimacy. This work defines sovereign provenance and logical sovereignty as necessary preconditions of authority, identifying the limits of memory, the limits of reasoning, and the conditions under which authority dissolves into narrative, assertion, or inherited momentum. It establishes negative constitutional boundaries governing when authority must contract, refuse assertion, or withdraw truth rather than invent legitimacy. This publication is doctrinal in nature and constitutes the WHY-layer (Doctrinal Layer) of the Continuity pillar within the Sovereign Corpus. It does not prescribe governance models, controls, safeguards, implementation practices, compliance requirements, certification schemes, or evaluative checklists. It does not provide remedies, enforcement mechanisms, or standards of proof. The doctrine is jurisdiction-neutral, technology-agnostic, and time-independent. It is intended as a constitutional reference for courts, regulators, institutional adjudicators, and sovereign reviewers assessing whether authority may be claimed, sustained, or withdrawn under conditions of temporal distance, memory degradation, or reasoning substitution.