Summary
Purpose limitation, the engine of the duty of loyalty, keeps eroding through "routine use" and "compatible purpose" exceptions. This article supplies the missing normative account. Authorized Informational Context holds that informational authority exists only within the bounded relationship that gives rise to it, defined by seven testable components: purpose, authority, roles, information, operations, temporal conditions and disclosure conditions.
An actor who exercises informational power beyond that context acts disloyally, whether by access, use, disclosure, combination, derivation, retention or transfer. The concept builds on Helen Nissenbaum's contextual integrity but asks the prior question of legitimate authority, and it completes NIST's attribute-based access control and Zero Trust frameworks, which can enforce policies but cannot judge their legitimacy. It identifies context collapse as the mechanism by which many particular authorizations become a general one.
Key claims
- Context defines the scope of entrusted power; loyalty governs its exercise.
- Context collapse is the mechanism of the digital general warrant.
- Architecture can preserve contextual boundaries, but law supplies the authority they enforce.
Where it fits
Read on the site: Proposition 4: context bounds authority.
Cite as
Michael G. Leahy, Context as Constitutional Constraint: How Authorized Informational Context Grounds the Fiduciary Duty of Loyalty (2026), https://ssrn.com/abstract=7488359.