On coercivity and regularity for linear elliptic systems

We introduce a nonlinear method to study a ??universal?? strong coercivity problem for monotone linear elliptic systems by compositions of finitely many constant coefficient tensors satisfying the Legendre?CHadamard strong ellipticity condition. We give conditions and counterexamples for universal coercivity. In the case of non-coercive systems we give examples to show that the corresponding variational integral may have infinitely many nowhere C ¹ minimizers on their supports. For some universally coercive systems we also present examples with affine boundary values which have nowhere C ¹ solutions.