Claim boundaries

Updated 3 October 2026: concept, except_when, claim, definition … sufficient, and default strength have been removed, together with their special deprecation diagnostic. References below to the former behavior and corpus sources are historical. New source uses relation, unless, duty, a strict rule, and defeasible.

What the construct does NOT do in 0.2: scope, reserved values, neighbouring constructs, and the selection rule.

OverviewBoundariesCorpus formsPitfalls

Does not

• Not create a fifth modality. The executable modality set is closed at four (duty, liberty, power, immunity); a jurisdiction may declare surface modalities, but lowering must lead into the four or be opaque. A claim is a view of one canonical position: no second instance, no status ladder of its own.
• Not hold a duty without an obliged party. The view is ternary; duty with one beneficiary and no addressee is not a claim — nobody answers.
• Not lower entitlement by itself. Choosing the lowering is the author’s job, not the engine’s: a bare entitlement never becomes a norm; the engine does not guess it but rejects the record.
• Not introduce a claim modality. A claim is a correlative view of a duty through claim_right; write the normative template as duty with bearer and beneficiary.
• Not replace judgment. A claim’s evaluative content (“fair”, “reasonable”, “proportionate”) is the judgment channel, not a goal condition: until the organ answers the status is undetermined FOR A REASON (REQUIRES_JUDGMENT), see the judgment page.

Reserved and closed

• The modality list is closed; the ordinary English word claim describes a legal relation, while claim_right(...) remains a query view, not a normative position head.
• The correlative mapping is fixed in three rows (claim_right ↔ duty, liability ↔ power, disability ↔ immunity); no invented correlatives.
• A power’s subject is a closed enumeration of subject matters from the empowering act’s vocabulary; absence is LDC-W5302, excess is LDC-E5307. This is the neighbouring, not this, construct, but its omission is most often masked by the word “entitlement”.

Neighbours and the selection rule

• duty vs liberty: when another party is obliged to act, write duty; permission to act without an addressee is liberty (Quran Mulk).
• duty vs power: content is another’s act by a deadline — the debtor’s duty; content is one’s own demand decided by an organ — a power (entitlement-as-power/).
• entitlement vs an institutional fact: “meets the conditions” with no obliged party — a fact (EU Charter: “NO POSITION”).
• The claim_right(...) view vs the then duty head: a query about the correlative right reads the existing position; create the normative position through duty.