Premature Commitment, Belated Consequence, and the Empty Binding Window

Many institutional failures are attributed to "slow process" or "execution shortfall." This paper argues that a structurally distinct class of failure — empty binding windows — is hidden inside that vocabulary. Plainly: an empty binding window exists when the system can only know enough to act after acting would no longer matter. We formalize the temporal seam as a two-curve model: admissibility maturity m(t), informally whether the system knows enough to bind, and consequence viability c(t), informally whether binding can still matter. The valid binding window W is the set of times on which both curves are above their thresholds. Three failure orientations follow: premature commitment binds while m has not matured; belated consequence binds after c has decayed; empty-window failure is the regime in which W is empty for all t. Distinguishing empty-window failure from ordinary process delay requires a discriminator: residual event-class mismatch. Closure requires changing the event class itself, not merely improving execution. Because the discrimination depends on what counts as feasible execution, we introduce a counterfactual regime selection rule and a subtype matrix that name which regime applies by default and what override burdens are required to deviate, with an enforcement layer that prevents framework-driven classification laundering. Worked cases — generational climate harm, FDA pre-market approval, routine administrative appeal, administrative-burden cascades, Sarbanes-Oxley and complex fraud, scientific pre-registration, platform-worker classification — demonstrate the framework across all four sub-types (natural-latency, procedural, manufactured, ontological), including one procedural negative control. The result is sibling to spatial substitution failures (Paper 25) on a temporal axis, and orthogonal to the four-layer decomposition (Paper 22).