THERMODYNAMIC JURISPRUDENCE

Why Legal Systems Converge — and Why They Fail

Rob Merivale
Independent Researcher, Devon, UK
18 December 2025 • ~30 min read

Correspondence

Academic, technical, or interdisciplinary correspondence regarding this paper may be directed via: science@robmerivale.com

Preprint Notice

This paper is published as a conceptual research preprint and public working paper.It has not undergone formal peer review. It is shared to invite critique, clarification, and cross-disciplinary discussion.

Abstract

Across history, every durable civilisation has converged on a remarkably similar set of legal prohibitions: murder, theft, fraud, assault, breach of agreement, and corruption. The rituals vary, the punishments vary, the ideologies vary — but the constraints do not. Traditional jurisprudence explains this convergence through moral intuition, social contract theory, evolutionary advantage, or institutional design. Each explanation captures part of the picture, yet none adequately explains the universality of legal constraints nor the recurring patterns of legal collapse.

This paper proposes a different starting point. Law is not primarily a moral system, but a thermodynamic one. Legal systems function as large-scale entropy-management architectures that preserve social coherence under uncertainty, conflict, and informational noise. Stability correlates with predictability and trust; collapse correlates with unmanaged entropy.

Drawing on thermodynamics, information theory, and comparative legal history, the paper reframes criminal, civil, contract, property, administrative, constitutional, and restorative law as specialised coherence-preservation mechanisms. Comparative case studies — including English common law, Nordic governance, Roman imperial law, Soviet legalism, and Rwanda’s Gacaca courts — are used to test this framework against real historical outcomes.

The central claim is simple: justice is best understood not as moral arbitration, but as coherence restoration. Legal systems persist when they suppress entropy efficiently, and fail when entropy overwhelms institutional coherence. As societies become more literate in these dynamics, the role of formal law contracts — not by abolition, but by redundancy.

1. The Puzzle of Legal Convergence

1.1 The Strange Uniformity of Law

Across more than four thousand years of recorded history, spanning radically different cultures, religions, economies, and political systems, a striking pattern appears: every durable civilisation converges on an almost identical suite of legal prohibitions.

Unlawful killing.
Theft and property violation.
Fraud and deceptive signalling.
Assault and violent coercion.
Breach of agreement.
Corruption of institutions.
Public disorder.

The names differ.
The rituals differ.
The punishments differ.

But the constraints themselves do not.

Ancient Mesopotamian codes, Roman law, Islamic jurisprudence, medieval canon law, common law, civil law systems, customary law in small-scale societies, and modern constitutional regimes all prohibit the same core behaviours. Even societies that explicitly reject one another’s moral foundations still converge on the same legal boundaries.

This uniformity is not superficial. It persists across changes in technology, population size, economic structure, and belief. It appears independently in societies with no direct cultural contact. It re-emerges after collapse. It survives conquest, revolution, and reform.

The question is not whether legal systems differ. Of course they do.
The question is why they converge where it matters most.

1.2 Why Existing Explanations Fall Short

Jurisprudence has long attempted to answer this puzzle.

Natural law theorists argue that law reflects moral truths embedded in human nature.
Social contract theorists argue that rational agents agree to rules for mutual benefit.
Evolutionary theorists emphasise cooperation equilibria and group selection.
Economists highlight transaction costs and incentive alignment.
Sociologists point to norm formation and cultural inheritance.

Each framework captures something real. None explains the whole pattern.

None explains why societies with radically different moral codes still prohibit the same acts.
None explains why legal collapse follows similar trajectories across ideology.
None explains why legal complexity tends to increase before failure.
None explains why restorative systems succeed only under specific conditions.

Most importantly, none explains why legal systems behave like fragile systems subject to threshold failure rather than stable moral constructs.

To understand that, we must shift the frame.

1.3 A Different Starting Point

Human societies are not primarily moral communities. They are large, fragile, information-dense systems.

They depend on:

• predictable behaviour
• reliable signalling
• shared expectations
• trust across time and distance
• coordination among strangers

These are not ethical achievements first and foremost. They are structural ones.

Once societies scale beyond face-to-face interaction, the primary problem they face is not moral disagreement — it is entropy. Uncertainty. Noise. Conflict. Defection. Cascading breakdown of trust.

The question law answers is therefore not “What is right?”
It is “What keeps this system coherent?”

2. Social Order as a Thermodynamic Problem

2.1 Societies as Dissipative Structures

In thermodynamics, a dissipative structure is a system that maintains order only by continuously expending energy and exporting entropy. Living organisms, ecosystems, weather systems, and economies all fall into this category.

Human societies are no different.

They exist far from equilibrium. Social order is not a natural resting state. It must be actively maintained against constant sources of disorder: conflict, scarcity, deception, misunderstanding, and opportunism.

As societies scale, this maintenance problem intensifies. Coordination costs rise. Signals degrade. Trust becomes indirect. The margin for error shrinks.

A small group can tolerate high uncertainty because members know one another.
A large society cannot.

Large-scale social order is therefore a thermodynamic achievement before it is a moral one.

2.2 Entropy in Human Behaviour

Every human action injects some amount of uncertainty into the social system.

Certain behaviours reduce uncertainty:

• truth-telling
• promise-keeping
• reciprocity
• predictable competence
• fair dealing
• mutual aid

These behaviours stabilise expectations and increase coherence.

Other behaviours increase uncertainty:

• lying
• theft
• assault
• exploitation
• corruption
• arbitrary use of power
• betrayal of trust

Crucially, the distinction is not moral. It is structural.

A lie is destabilising not because it is “bad”, but because it corrupts signalling.
Violence is destabilising not because it is “evil”, but because it creates fear cascades and retaliatory spirals.
Corruption is destabilising not because it offends virtue, but because it destroys predictability in institutions.

Once this is seen, the universality of legal prohibitions becomes legible.

2.3 Moral Norms and the Limits of Scale

Moral norms are not irrelevant to this picture. In small-scale societies, shared moral expectations function as low-cost, informal entropy suppressors. Reputation, reciprocity, and social sanction operate efficiently when groups are small, signals are direct, and relationships are persistent.

Formal law emerges when these mechanisms no longer scale.

As population size increases, interactions become anonymous, time horizons extend, and moral signalling becomes unreliable. At that point, coherence must be stabilised through explicit, formalised structures. Law does not replace morality; it compensates for its scaling limits.

This transition explains why moral language often persists in legal systems long after morality alone is no longer sufficient to maintain order.

2.4 Law as Noise Suppression

From an information-theoretic perspective, social life is continuous signal exchange across a noisy channel.

Law functions as a noise-suppression architecture.

It:

• stabilises expectations
• filters unreliable signals
• dampens conflict
• repairs ruptures
• prevents defection cascades
• restores predictability after shocks

In this sense, law is structurally analogous to:

• error-correcting codes in communication systems
• homeostasis in physiology
• feedback control in engineering
• regulation in complex adaptive systems

The function is always the same: preserve coherence under entropy load.

3. Coherence, Entropy, and Persistence

3.1 Three Working Variables

To reason clearly about legal systems, three variables are useful.

Coherence (S)
The degree of predictability, trust, and structural reliability in a social system.

Entropy (E)
The degree of uncertainty, conflict, deception, corruption, and unpredictability injected into the system.

Persistence (P)
The likelihood that a social system maintains functional order over time rather than fragmenting or collapsing.

These variables are not metaphysical. They are observable and, in principle, measurable.

3.2 A Heuristic Stability Relation

At a high level, persistence increases with coherence and decreases with entropy.

One compact way to express this trade-off is:

P=CS²/E

This is not presented as a settled physical law, but as a heuristic model. It captures two empirically robust regularities:

• Small increases in coherence often produce disproportionately large gains in stability.
• Accumulated entropy produces non-linear collapse rather than gradual, then sudden failure.

Whether expressed mathematically or verbally, the implication is the same: legal systems fail when entropy overwhelms coherence, and persist when coherence outpaces entropy.

3.3 Why This Explains Legal Universals

Certain behaviours inject catastrophic amounts of entropy into large social systems.

Murder destabilises safety expectations.
Fraud destroys trust in exchange.
Theft produces conflict cascades.
Corruption collapses institutional predictability.
Breach of agreement undermines cooperation across time.

Societies that fail to constrain these behaviours do not persist long enough to leave historical records.

Legal universals are therefore not moral coincidences. They are structural necessities.

4. Law as a Distributed Entropy-Management System

4.1 Overview of Legal Domains

Every major domain of law addresses a different entropy vector.

Criminal law neutralises catastrophic entropy.
Civil law stabilises disputes.
Contract law enforces predictability.
Property law prevents resource conflict.
Administrative law controls bureaucratic entropy.
Constitutional law stabilises the stabilisers.
Restorative justice repairs relational coherence.

The diversity of law reflects the diversity of entropy sources — not moral pluralism.

4.2 Criminal Law

Criminal law targets behaviours that produce non-linear destabilisation.

Violence creates fear cascades.
Fraud corrupts signalling networks.
Corruption undermines entire institutions.

Criminal punishment has two thermodynamic functions:

• removing ongoing entropy sources
• restoring system-wide predictability

Punishment itself, however, generates entropy: adversarial trials, incarceration costs, stigma, and social fragmentation.

A punitive response is justified only when it restores more coherence than it destroys.

This is why both excessive punishment and insufficient enforcement destabilise societies.

4.3 Civil, Contract, and Property Law

Civil law resolves disputes to prevent escalation.
Contract law stabilises cooperation across time.
Property law prevents violent competition over resources.

These domains do not exist to express moral judgment. They exist to stabilise expectations so complex societies can function at scale.

Markets collapse without predictable contract enforcement.
Agricultural societies collapse without stable property rules.
Pluralistic societies collapse without neutral dispute resolution.

4.4 Administrative and Constitutional Law

Bureaucracies themselves become entropy sources as societies scale.

Administrative law introduces feedback loops: procedural fairness, review mechanisms, transparency requirements.

Constitutional law stabilises the coherence architecture itself: separation of powers, legitimacy norms, succession rules.

When political entropy exceeds constitutional coherence, legitimacy collapses regardless of ideology.

4.5 Restorative Justice

Restorative systems directly target relational entropy: distrust, stigma, fragmentation.

They are extraordinarily entropy-efficient — but only when baseline coherence is high.

This explains why restorative justice thrives in some societies and collapses in others.

5. Comparative Evidence

5.1 English Common Law

English common law evolved as a precedent-based, incremental system. Its strength lies in distributed error correction across time. Legal change is absorbed gradually, preserving predictability even under social change.

The result has been unusually low legal entropy over long horizons.

5.2 Nordic Governance

Nordic societies exhibit high trust and thin law. Coherence is maintained socially, allowing legal systems to remain minimal and non-adversarial.

This represents a thermodynamic ideal: high coherence, low entropy, minimal coercion.

5.3 Roman Imperial Law

Roman law grew increasingly complex as corruption and administrative entropy rose. Legal hypertrophy preceded collapse. The law survived on parchment after it failed in practice.

5.4 Soviet Legalism

The Soviet system exhibited extreme codification with low predictability. Formal legality masked high entropy. Arbitrary enforcement destroyed coherence, leading to collapse despite extensive legal apparatus.

5.5 Rwanda’s Gacaca Courts

After genocide, Rwanda faced catastrophic entropy. Community-based restorative justice succeeded where punitive systems would have failed because it restored coherence faster than it generated entropy.

6. Measuring Legal Entropy

Legal entropy manifests in four domains:

• adjudicative unpredictability
• enforcement inconsistency
• institutional complexity
• social trust collapse

Rising variance in court outcomes, corruption, rule proliferation, and declining trust reliably precede legal failure.

Collapse is non-linear. Systems degrade slowly, then fail suddenly when thresholds are crossed.

6.1 Emerging Entropy Vectors

As societies evolve, new entropy sources emerge. Digital communication, algorithmic decision-making, global supply chains, environmental stress, and cross-border coordination introduce novel forms of uncertainty and signal corruption.

These do not invalidate the framework. They extend it.

New legal domains arise when new entropy vectors threaten coherence. The underlying dynamic — entropy accumulation versus coherence restoration — remains the same.

7. Implications

If this framework is correct, several implications follow.

Punitive systems are inherently costly and unstable.
Legal complexity is compensatory, not progressive.
High-trust societies require less law.
Low-trust societies require coercion.

As societies become more literate in coherence dynamics, the role of formal law contracts — not by abolition, but by redundancy.

8. Edge Cases

Self-defence, justified deception, civil disobedience, revolution, mental illness, privacy, and forgiveness all resolve cleanly when viewed as entropy trade-offs rather than moral exceptions.

These cases have always been thermodynamic problems. Moral language obscured that fact.

9. Conclusion: The Law Before the Law

Law did not invent order. It approximated it.

Legal systems are humanity’s first large-scale attempt to manage entropy in social life. Their universality reflects structural necessity, not shared belief.

Justice is coherence restoration.
Collapse is entropy overwhelm.
Trust is measurable structure, not sentiment.

Legal systems persist only as long as they suppress entropy efficiently. As societies learn how coherence is actually maintained, the scaffolding recedes.

This is not utopian optimism. It is systems logic.

Where coherence is preserved, systems live.
Where entropy overwhelms coherence, systems die.

Everything else is commentary.