ABSTRACT
This Handbook is designed as a learning tool for students seeking a clear and unified understanding of private law. Instead of presenting contract, tort, strict liability, and damages as separate doctrinal fields, it reconstructs them through a single structural framework: the geometry of legal responsibility.
The Handbook introduces a minimal set of structural variables – volitional conduct, risk intensity, directionality, temporality, and legal perspective – and demonstrates how these dimensions generate and organize legal responsibility across doctrines. Tort law is reframed as a system of risk creation and directional attribution; contract law is reconstructed through structural closure of promise-induced response; strict liability is explained as pre-allocated risk within an actor’s responsibility radius; and damages doctrine is reinterpreted as the boundary-setting mechanism of that radius.
By shifting analysis from doctrinal labels to structural positioning, this Handbook resolves persistent conceptual confusions, including the boundary between intent and recklessness, the function of consideration, the role of reliance, and the limits of recoverable loss. It further demonstrates that private law operates as a unified system of risk allocation within bounded fields of responsibility rather than as a collection of historically accumulated rules.
The aim is not to replace doctrine, but to provide students with a simplified, internally coherent model that makes existing doctrine intelligible, predictable, and structurally complete.
Chen, Hung Chi, Handbook of the Geometry of Legal Responsibility (February 6, 2026).
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