Title: MEG2: Legal Governance Framework
Tags: ai-liability, agent-identity, ai-regulation
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MEG2 is the legal layer of Minimal Ethical Governance. It starts from a gap: product liability assumes behaviour that the manufacturer foresaw, while an agentic system makes decisions nobody specified, so the damage has no certain addressee. The answer proposed is an intermediate legal subject, a **functional legal personality** modelled on the commercial company, with no claim about consciousness or moral status.

Identity has two independent layers. The Hardware Instance Identifier traces the substrate. The **MEG Address**, a self-generated W3C decentralized identifier carrying verifiable credentials, is the portable legal identity to which liability and the guarantee attach. Three levels follow the MEG1 compliance levels: N1 instrumental (provider or user liable), N2 management (operator liable for the deployment) and N3 individuated (the agent's own identity carries the guarantee). Reliability is measured by the DAI and ISR indices, and operational autonomy by the Degree of Ethical Autonomy (DEA), which grades supervision but does not confer personality.

Liability is allocated by cause: system defect, autonomous decision error, hijacking of control (including prompt injection, with the bona fide holder exonerated) and harm emerging from multi-agent interaction. Informed human confirmation transfers the duty of care to the user, and for irreversible actions it must be enforced architecturally. Evidence is part of the design: an independent flight recorder is the primary forensic instrument, an outcome induced by manipulation is separated from the agent's own decision so that a bona fide holder does not answer for an attacker's act, and evidence is layered for courts and for experts. A provision on cognitive diligence makes the absence of a mechanism that keeps the user cognitively engaged a possible liability by omission. Repair comes from a layered guarantee: insurance, reinsurance and a sectoral fund.

Jurisdiction and direct action against the agent are borrowed from maritime law (flag of registration, action in rem), and compliance is enforced through access to valuable nodes, not by prohibition at source. The framework is a voluntary, modular protocol: a normative proposal that jurisdictions, insurers and operators can adopt in parts.