Z (posture dispersion)
The noise-corrected variance of dispositions across a declared panel of judicial postures reasoning over identical verified law, normalized to the interval from 0 to 1, with abstention when the signal does not clear the instrument's noise floor.
First used in What Remains for the Judge When the Machine Has Already Verified the Law?
Z is computed per procedural gate. Each posture scores the gate on a 1 to 10 scale and runs more than once. The variance of posture means, minus the pooled replicate variance divided by the number of replicates, estimates the systematic posture effect; dividing by 20.25, the largest variance possible on a scale of width 9, bounds the result between 0 and 1.
The reading rule is short. Low Z: the law decides. High Z: the judge's posture decides. Spread at noise level: abstain.
Z is never reported bare. It travels with its interval, noise floor, abstention status and versioned panel declaration, because the numerator is panel-relative: a panel of near-clones reads low on any motion, and a panel stretched to the lawful extremes reads higher on the same one.