FROM CONSTITUTIONAL COMMITMENT TO REALIZED VALUE A Transmission-Matrix Framework for Institutional Performance

Constitutional law ordinarily asks what a provision authorizes, prohibits, or requires. It less often asks how much of an authorized commitment survives the institutions charged with delivering it. This Article develops a transmission-matrix framework for that second question. The model treats a constitutional or statutory commitment as an input that passes through legally and empirically distinct stages: legal specification, administrative execution, claimant access, and outcome production. Each stage has a conditional transmission coefficient, and total fidelity is their product rather than an unsupported subtraction of heterogeneous losses. Courts do not ‘collapse a wavefunction.’ They alter one or more transition rules, sometimes increasing fidelity for one constitutional value while reducing it for another. The framework therefore requires the analyst to identify the protected value, population, baseline, time horizon, and counterfactual before assigning a coefficient. It distinguishes authorized funds from rights and institutional powers; separates delay, diversion, exclusion, and ineffectiveness; and supplies an audit protocol with uncertainty bounds. A worked $100 million grant example is expressly illustrative. Three constitutional episodes—Marbury, the Slaughter-House Cases, and Wickard—show why landmark decisions cannot be ranked on a single national fidelity scale, but can be analyzed as changes in specified channels. The resulting framework is modest but testable: it converts constitutional implementation into a set of stage-specific empirical questions without pretending that constitutional meaning is reducible to dollars or that historical eras possess self-evident percentages.