Regulatory Legitimacy Without Referents: On the Syntax of AI-Generated Legal Drafts

Abstract

This article analyzes how AI-generated legal texts simulate legitimacy without referencing a sovereign authority. Based on a provenance-verified corpus of machine-generated documents, including contracts, terms of service, and automated policy clauses, the study shows that the legislator is structurally displaced by recurring patterns of passive voice, normative conditionals, and chains of subordinate clauses. The result is legalidad sin fuente (sourceless legality), where the appearance of regulatory authority is produced by syntactic form rather than institutional attribution. Comparing these drafts with traditional legislative writing, the article outlines a typology that instantiates autoridad no referencial and identifies a dual risk: loss of authority traceability and an accountability gap in the binding effects of these texts. This syntactic delegation constitutes a paradigm of regla compilada, situated within the tradition of formal grammars, in which language enacts governance without a governing subject.

DOI

• Primary archive: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16746581
• Secondary archive: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.29829101
• SSRN: Pending assignment (ETA: Q3 2025)