Layer Before Law: An Addressed Architecture for Relational Admissibility, Effective Law Selection, and Quantum-Gravitational Recovery

Quantum theory and general relativity are extraordinarily successful within their demonstrated domains, yet their standard formalisms are not straightforwardly unified. Layer Before Law asks whether part of that difficulty may arise one conceptual step earlier: before selecting the physical law that governs a state, has the relevant object, context, admissibility structure, and scale been typed correctly? Within the McLaughlin-Kairos Unified Field Theory (MKUFT) research programme, the proposal is an addressed architecture rather than a completed theory of quantum gravity. A complete effective state carries substrate participation, informational and relational structure, physical expression, observer-positioned registration, contextual address, and retained load-bearing history. A compatibility map constructs an admissibility descriptor; a law assembler then constructs the active physical-law object. Physical propagation, measurement or registration, and readdressing of the next effective possibility object follow. The paper adds a property-relative law-ownership gate and bidirectional scale readdressing, separates higher-law failure from constitutive closure and recoverability, applies the framework to entanglement as a worked constraint case, states explicit Bell/local-hidden-variable and no-signalling requirements, and defines recovery obligations for quantum and gravitational regimes. It does not derive the Born rule, Bell correlations, quantum field theory, Einstein dynamics, or a fundamental quantum-gravity theory. Its contribution is a typed, falsifiable research architecture for testing whether relational and contextual structure performs independent work beyond the strongest adequate physical-state, history, and boundary description.