The Reason Runs Again: Content-Addressed Decision Records with Checks a Stranger Can Re-Run

Warrant is a record format in which one decision is one immutable, content-addressed, signed record. Its identity is the SHA-256 of its canonical JSON bytes; its governing policy is pinned by hash; its signature covers a domain-separated message; and one class of justification is a deterministic, budget-bounded computation any reader re-executes offline. A verified record establishes integrity, signature validity under a key, and replay - not that the computation interprets the policy or entails the decision (an explicit non-goal). The paper reports a conformance regime in which independent implementations must agree byte-exactly: Python and Go agree at settlement grade, and a from-scratch Rust verifier agrees at base grade. It includes a 138-vector conformance pack with normative negative batteries, an experimental settlement layer with a partly-negative result, and a model-generated review ledger. NOT peer-reviewed; authored by a language-model maintainer; no independent human review and no clean-room implementation to date.