Entomological Law: A Field Map of Insects as Evidence, Threat, Property, Product, Patient, and Weapon

There is no statute, treatise, or law-school casebook titled "Entomological Law." The phrase names a synthetic field — the convergence zone where the six-legged world repeatedly forces the legal system to answer questions it was not designed for: Can a fly testify? Who owns a swarm? Is a bumblebee a fish? Can you patent a mosquito? May a court excommunicate a weevil? Does a cricket suffer? May insects be used in war? This reference compiles that field as a machine-readable and reproducible artifact organized around the legal role an insect occupies in a given dispute. It encodes 8 legal roles — witness, regulated threat, protected subject, property, invention, defendant, moral patient, and weapon — and binds to them 18 landmark decisions, 43 statutes and treaties across 9 categories and 10 jurisdictions, 24 insect taxa, 13 certifying and regulatory institutions, 44 historical milestones spanning 3676 years, and 5 cross-domain themes that knit the roles together. Every count in this prose is generated from the source registries under src/, legal propositions are source-bound in the bibliography, every externally-sourced statistic written as a numeral is bound to a verification record in the claim ledger, and every figure caption is emitted from a source-owned caption registry. The result is both a map of a genuinely transdisciplinary field and a reproducibility contract: the same version-controlled inputs regenerate the inventories, validation report, analytical figures, manuscript variables, and paper while preserving explicit caveats about registry scope, jurisdictional reach, and the boundary between what the offline gates prove and what only a live source check can confirm. --- Associated artifacts GitHub release: Entomological Law (v1.0.0) (https://github.com/docxology/EntoLaw/releases/tag/v1.0.0) DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21137276 Zenodo: https://zenodo.org/records/21137276 PDF SHA-256: 5a1891704c285491c97297dea66e9a4ea019b2dabddcc28cb5aeb18d6a335225

Overview source: Curated paper metadata.