# Spirit of the law

`kaal:entity:spirit-of-the-law`

**Status.** derived

This node is assembled mechanically from the 3 claims that carry the concept tag `spirit-of-the-law`. It is a roster of what the corpus says under this term. It is **not** an adjudicated definition: no single statement here has been ruled canonical, and no first-appearance call has been made. Read the claims and judge for yourself.

## Every claim under this term

3 claims across 2 works, 2021 to 2021.

**2021**

- [3782192-014](https://wulfkaal.github.io/claims/3782192-014) [mechanism/argued] *(failure mode)* -- When the letter of the law becomes more important than the spirit of the law, internal competition for power makes the winning strategy to push behavior to the limit of what is acceptable.
  > When the letter of the law is more important than the spirit of the law, then internal competition for power within the hierarchy reveals the best strategy is to push your behavior to the limit of what is acceptable.
  Craig Calcaterra, Wulf A. Kaal, Introduction to Decentralization (2021). SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3782192
- [3782192-019](https://wulfkaal.github.io/claims/3782192-019) [condition/argued] -- The second necessity for long-term stability is that the organization hold to its ideals and transcendental values, so that the spirit of the law overrides the letter of the law.
  > Second, the organization needs to hold to its ideals, its tran- scendental values. The spirit of the law must override the letter of the law.
  Craig Calcaterra, Wulf A. Kaal, Introduction to Decentralization (2021). SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3782192
- [3782203-014](https://wulfkaal.github.io/claims/3782203-014) [failure/argued] *(failure mode)* -- It is impossible to set up formal rules that keep a group behaving cooperatively in the long run, even if those rules are policed perfectly; the spirit of the law matters more than the letter of the law.
  > It is impossible to set up formal rules for a group to keep them behaving in a cooper- ative manner in the long run, even if the rules are policed perfectly.
  Craig Calcaterra, Wulf A. Kaal, A Technical Perspective on Decentralization (2021). SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3782203

## Verify

Every claim above resolves to a record carrying a verbatim source quote, the sha256 of the source PDF, and a preformatted citation. Nothing here asks to be taken on trust.

    curl -s https://wulfkaal.github.io/entities/spirit-of-the-law.md | sha256sum

**Canonical form.** This markdown file is the canonical hashed representation of this entity node. Its sha256 is the content hash.