{
  "id": "law.rule",
  "term": "law",
  "sense": "rule",
  "pos": "noun",
  "status": "review",
  "level": 3,
  "arena": "law",
  "domain": "emergence",
  "style": null,
  "definition": "a regular pattern that is what will happen when a thing is with another thing",
  "folk_gloss": null,
  "emergence": {
    "components": [
      "pattern.regularity",
      "change.process",
      "happen.event-occurrence",
      "regular.frequency"
    ],
    "interaction": "regular patterns and repeated occurrences interact with change processes to produce predictable outcomes",
    "novel_properties": [
      "predictable outcome",
      "invariant behavior across instances",
      "necessity in co-occurrence"
    ]
  },
  "examples": [
    {
      "text": "Water boils at 100°C at sea level under standard atmospheric pressure.",
      "domain": "physics"
    },
    {
      "text": "DNA polymerase copies nucleotides in sequence during E. coli cell division every 20 minutes at 37°C.",
      "domain": "biology"
    },
    {
      "text": "The Y2K remediation fixed date fields in COBOL banking systems before 2000-01-01.",
      "domain": "computing"
    }
  ],
  "relations": [],
  "used_by": [
    "contract.legal",
    "court.legal",
    "example.illustration",
    "government.administrative",
    "legal.law",
    "license.legal",
    "official.authority",
    "police.authority",
    "political.governance",
    "responsible.moral",
    "rules.social",
    "tax.economic"
  ],
  "forms": [
    "law",
    "laws"
  ],
  "closed": true,
  "provenance": {
    "author": "openrouter:openai/gpt-oss-120b",
    "date": "2026-07-29",
    "confidence": 0.6,
    "reconciled": {
      "by": "openrouter:qwen/qwen3-235b-a22b-2507",
      "date": "2026-07-31",
      "changed": "components",
      "note": "Added happen.event-occurrence and regular.frequency to components since they are essential to the definition of a rule as a recurring, outcome-bearing pattern in change; the original definition was co"
    }
  },
  "canonical": "https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-law.rule"
}