CONCEPT
Full and Partial Jurisdiction
Abbott's distinction between full jurisdiction — where a profession controls the entire process from diagnosis to evaluation — and various partial jurisdictions, where professions control only specific stages of a larger process.
Abbott distinguishes between full jurisdiction, in which a profession controls the entire process from diagnosis to treatment to evaluation, and various partial jurisdictions, in which it controls only one stage. Full jurisdiction provides the strongest professional authority but is also the rarest and most vulnerable to fragmentation. The AI transition is fragmenting full jurisdictions across knowledge-based professions into partial jurisdictions distributed among multiple actors—AI-augmented practitioners, traditional specialists, client organizations, and platform providers. The fragmentation is resisted by those losing full jurisdiction but proceeds because distributed jurisdiction often serves organizational demand better than unified professional authority.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Full jurisdiction was the medical profession's historical achievement. Physicians once controlled all aspects of healthcare—diagnosis, treatment decisions, procedure execution, evaluation of outcomes, long-term patient management. The rise of nursing, pharmacy, physical therapy, and other allied health professions fragmented this into partial jurisdictions, each controlled by a different professional group. Physicians resisted fragmentation, arguing that