Legitimacy Inertia and the Centralization Trap: A Structural Account of Institutional Failure in American Law

American legal institutions routinely persist in practices that generate demonstrable harm despite extensive evidence, sustained critique, and repeated reform efforts. Conventional explanations emphasize bias, corruption, or ideological capture. This Article advances a structural alternative: legitimacy inertia. When decision-making authority is centralized and the legitimacy required to continue operating exceeds the legitimacy available, institutions substitute procedural rigidity, narrative preservation, and authority defense for substantive correction. This dynamic produces outcomes that appear perverse from the standpoint of justice but rational from the standpoint of institutional survival. The Article proposes a threshold condition for identifying when legal systems lose steerability and argues that many pathologies of American criminal justice reflect this condition. It further explains why informational transparency, empirical critique, and good-faith reform efforts routinely fail once legitimacy inertia is active. Finally, the Article outlines modular authority as a design alternative capable of preserving institutional legitimacy while restoring corrective capacity. The contribution is explanatory rather than normative, shifting the focus of legal reform from exhortation to institutional design.