The Jurisdictional Absence of People

Legitimacy Foundations — Paper V

Modern law exercises jurisdiction over territory, institutions, transactions, and artificial persons. It does not exercise jurisdiction over people as such. People appear in law primarily as subjects of regulation, obligation, or compliance, not as bounded jurisdictional entities with standing of their own. In effect, the human person is ajurisdictional.

This absence is not semantic. It is structural. Where jurisdiction does not attach, authority attaches without reciprocity.

Because people lack jurisdictional standing, regulation operates unilaterally. States may compel identification, movement conditions, data surrender, medical compliance, labor participation, and procedural eligibility without reciprocal jurisdictional constraints placed upon the actors imposing those requirements. Authority is presumed upstream. The human body remains downstream.

The legal system relies on the human as a point of enforcement while denying the human any equivalent capacity to refuse, bound, or condition institutional action.

This asymmetry produces continuity failures. Obligations imposed on people persist even when institutional safeguards fail, oversight collapses, or responsibility fragments across agencies and contractors. Harm does not require malice. It arises from the structural fact that no jurisdiction exists at the level where consequences are borne.

Remedies are displaced into after-the-fact processes that assume standing which was never recognized at the point of imposition.

The contradiction is visible but unresolved. Law depends on the human body for enforcement, risk absorption, and continuity of function, while simultaneously denying that same body any bounded jurisdictional recognition.

Authority cannot be both absent and relied upon.

Where jurisdiction stops short of the human person, legitimacy is substituted rather than established.

2025