The Unit of Legal Analysis and the Problem of Ethical Individuation: On the Suppression of Internal Differentiation in Legal Corpora

Legal corpora are routinely characterised as ethically unified wholes—'harsh', 'progressive', 'patriarchal'—as though all provisions shared a single normative orientation. This article argues that such block readings disregard normative individuation, compressing internal differentiation and diminishing the interpreter's capacity for precise ethical judgment. The argument proceeds in three stages. First, it identifies the unit of analysis as a distinct jurisprudential problem. Second, it proposes a heuristic framework of four minimal ethical distinctions (D1–D4) for registering internal normative variation within a single corpus. Third, it deploys the Sinaitic legal codes as a methodological illustration showing that provision-level reading discloses ethical heterogeneity which corpus-level characterisation suppresses. A final extension to proportionality doctrine demonstrates that the same structural error recurs in contemporary constitutional adjudication whenever balancing proceeds over a misdescribed legal object. Before law is evaluated, the interpreter must first ask what legal object has been individuated.