Each concept is read twice: whether the approach carries it over, and whether the approach's own sources claim it. A concept that the approach claims but does not carry over is a shortfall. A concept that it neither claims nor carries over is an omission, which marks a gap in the field rather than a failure of the work.
Plural normative orders
PresentClaimed · preservedDefinition (John Griffiths, What Is Legal Pluralism?, 1986)
Several bodies of norms operate at once within one social field. Rather than one official legal system with exceptions, there are multiple active systems of rules side by side, each generating its own decisions.
Analysis
Several bodies of decisions are in force at once, and each is built from its own community's history. MoMoE instantiates seven experts, each specialized to one community. Decoding the Rule Book recovers each subreddit's standard from that subreddit's own removals and shows that the recovered standards differ. These are separate living orders rather than one official rulebook with tolerated local variation. One complication is that MoMoE's main contribution is applying those experts to thirty communities they were not built from. The lineages are therefore real, but their reach is not confined to the communities that generated them.
Interlegality
AbsentOmissionDefinition (Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Toward a New Legal Common Sense, 2002)
Normative orders do not just sit in parallel but interpenetrate. People live at their intersections and are subject to several at once. The boundaries themselves are porous.
Analysis
The orders are disjoint by construction. A post belongs to exactly one community, and neither system can represent a case that sits at the intersection of two standards. Generalizing to thirty unseen subreddits is transfer rather than interpenetration. It treats a new community as another instance of the same kind, rather than as an order that overlaps with the others.
Choice of forum
PartialShortfall · partially preservedDefinition (Conflict-of-laws practice)
When several lineages of decisions are in force, a stated rule must assign each new case to one of them. Otherwise, parties simply shop for the forum that favors them, which is the failure predicted for this regime.
Analysis
MoMoE's Allocate operator routes each case to a body of decisions. This is the function that conflict-of-laws asks for, and nothing else in the encyclopedia performs it. However, the allocator is learned and optimized for accuracy, and it is not a stated rule. Nobody can be told in advance which community's standard will judge their case, nobody can invoke the rule, and nobody can contest the allocation. Decoding the Rule Book has no routing step at all.