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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Sichelman, Ted
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.14145
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Table of Contents:
  • First-order legal relations specify the duties of legal actors. For instance, the duty not to trespass derives from a first-order law. Second-order legal relations generally concern the intentional, volitional acts of legal actors exercising legal powers to change first-order laws or legal relations. For example, a landowner may exercise a second-order power to change another legal actor's duty not to trespass into a legal permission to enter the landowner's property. This article adapts the notion of legal order to propose a theory of first- and higher-order physical laws, contending that current physical theories implicitly (and wrongly) assume that essentially all physical processes can be modeled using first-order laws. Incorporating second- and higher-order structures from legal models into physical theories provides a novel approach for framing problems in physics, such as the process of quantum measurement. Specifically, quantum measurement is better explained as a fundamentally second-order physical process that alters the underlying first-order physical "microlaws" governing the evolution of the quantum system.