Ubiquity of complete intersection liaison classes

In this paper, we provide constructions to enumerate large numbers of CI-liaison classes. To this end, we introduce a liaison invariant and prove several results concerning it, notably that it commutes with hypersurface sections. This theory is applied to the CI-liaison classes of ruled joins of projective schemes, yielding strong obstructions for such joins to lie in the same liaison class. A second construction arises from the actions of automorphisms on liaison classes, allowing the enumeration of many liaison classes of perfect ideals of codimension at least three.