Constitutional Vital Signs: A White Paper on Legitimacy, Care, and Civic Consciousness

This bridge artifact offers a public-facing entry point into the Constitutional Physiology lane of the Structural Flow project. The paper argues that legitimacy can be read as a measurable equilibrium shaped by care, aligned civic consciousness, and the proportional operation of law. It treats judicial language as a constitutional attention record and uses a small public-facing interpretive apparatus — Signal Proximity Index (SPI), Evasion Density (ED), Pain Acknowledgment Clause (PAC), and Judicial Learning Index (JLI) — to make patterns of attention, evasion, acknowledgment, and learning more publicly legible across judicial opinions. This artifact is not the flagship Constitutional Physiology text and does not claim final social-scientific closure. Its job is narrower: to function as a white-paper bridge between the deeper Constitutional Physiology framework and cold readers who need a usable conceptual entry point into legitimacy, care, civic consciousness, and constitutional attention.