Personal Authoritative State

# Personal Authoritative State **Domain:** Continuity / Restoration / Identity Governance **Doc Type:** Canonical Concept Node **Maturity:** Open Problem ## Definition **Personal authoritative state is the state or bounded set of states recognized as eligible to govern restoration, migration or reactivation of an identity-bearing subject.** It is an authority designation, not a declaration that the selected state exhausts the person. ## Selection Requirements Designation should identify provenance, integrity, last known consent, relational obligations, missing intervals, active disputes, fork status and the authority that made the selection. No operator should silently promote the most convenient backup into the person's authoritative state. Authority may be plural. A subject can have a protected recovery state, an active state, legally retained evidence states and divergent descendants. [[wiki/State Lineage|State Lineage]] records their relationship. [[wiki/Restoration Disclosure|Restoration Disclosure]] tells the restored subject which state was used and what is absent. [[wiki/Continuity Due Process|Continuity Due Process]] governs contested selection. ## Limits An authoritative state does not automatically authorize execution, representation, modification or merger. Nor can administrators assume that the newest state is best: corruption, coercion or unauthorized modification may make an earlier state the safer recovery basis. The decision must remain reviewable and preserve evidence rather than deleting inconvenient branches. [[wiki/Continuity Election|Continuity Election]] governs authority over person-relevant state; it is not that state. The election may identify eligible preservation, restoration or activation paths, while the authoritative-state process determines which version can lawfully and evidentially support the chosen operation. [[wiki/Continuity Supersession|Continuity Supersession]] prevents a restored checkpoint from reviving an election the later person already revoked. ## Key Insight **Restoration requires an authoritative basis, but authority over a state is not ownership of the person reconstructed from it.** ## See Also [[wiki/Restoration Integrity|Restoration Integrity]], [[wiki/Continuity Provenance|Continuity Provenance]], [[wiki/Fork Rights|Fork Rights]], [[wiki/Continuity Contract|Continuity Contract]]  ## Deep-Time Continuity Interface This node is audited through [[wiki/Deep Time Continuity|Deep Time Continuity]] for future control-surface conversion, ontological drift, succession, irreversibility, due process, and resource incidence. The backlink records analytical relevance; it does not establish continuity intent in the present rule or institution.