Trespass¶
Select the governing trespass branch and jurisdiction, then test protected interest, intrusion, authorization, fault, harm, defenses, and remedy without importing rules from a different branch.
Core Idea¶
Trespass is a family of legal wrongs and offenses organized around an unauthorized or unprivileged interference with a protected interest in land, personal property, bodily integrity, or liberty. Its recurring abstraction is not “crossing a boundary is illegal.” It is a branch-selecting decision procedure:
- identify the jurisdiction and date;
- identify the protected interest and therefore the trespass branch;
- identify the claimant or public authority entitled to invoke that branch;
- characterize the defendant's act and the applicable intent or fault rule;
- determine whether consent, license, or another privilege authorized the act;
- apply that branch's harm, causation, defense, and remedy rules.
Scope of Application¶
Civil land disputes. The framework separates claimant possession or control, intentional and unintentional entry routes, permission and its scope, necessity and other privileges, continuing intrusions, harm, and remedies. Property lines, easements, leases, public accommodations, airspace, subsurface entry, particles, vibrations, and removal obligations can activate distinct local rules rather than one physical-crossing test.
Personal-property interference. Borrowing, moving, damaging, disabling, or using a chattel can be analyzed by the seriousness and kind of interference. The framework distinguishes a harmless contact, actionable dispossession or impairment, and conversion-level dominion.
Clarity¶
The abstraction clarifies trespass by forcing two questions before every element list: what protected interest, and what jurisdiction? “Someone entered without permission” is underdetermined. The entry may implicate a possessor's civil land claim, a lease or easement, a privilege, a public-space rule, or a precisely defined statutory offense. The same physical movement can receive different classifications because the legal interest, authority, mental state, notice, and consequence differ.
Manages Complexity¶
Trespass disputes combine facts that sound simple—entry, touching, taking, remaining—with layered legal variables. The branch-selector architecture compresses that complexity into a reviewable matrix. Each possible theory gets one row; jurisdiction, interest, claimant, act, fault, authorization, privilege, harm, causation, and consequence become columns. Unsupported theories fail at the earliest missing role instead of borrowing a favorable rule from another row.
Abstract Reasoning¶
Use this recognition and inference sequence:
- Freeze the legal frame. Name the jurisdiction, operative date, civil or criminal posture, and controlling source hierarchy. 2. Select the protected interest. Land possession, chattel possession/use, bodily integrity, liberty, or a statutory public interest determines the candidate branch. 3. Test the claimant or charging authority. Ownership evidence may help, but ask for the exact possession, control, standing, or public authority the rule requires.
Knowledge Transfer¶
Transfer within law is exact at the level of role discipline. Land, chattels, person, and criminal statutes all reward the same habits: select the protected interest, locate the authorization rule, distinguish act from legal wrongfulness, keep privileges separate, and postpone remedies until liability is established. That common workflow enables comparison without merging doctrine.
Transfer from physical property to networked resources is conditional. A server is a chattel or system governed by specific law, not metaphorical real estate.
Relationships to Other Abstractions¶
Current abstraction Trespass Domain-specific
Parents (2) — outgoing typed relations
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Trespass includes Boundary Prime
Boundary — prospective composition / presupposes / strict. Every trespass branch identifies a legally protected domain—land possession, chattel use, bodily integrity, liberty, or statutory premises—and determines whether an act entered.
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Trespass presupposes, typical Consent Prime
Boundary — prospective composition / presupposes / strict. Every trespass branch identifies a legally protected domain—land possession, chattel use, bodily integrity, liberty, or statutory premises—and determines whether an act entered.
Hierarchy paths (2) — routes to 2 parentless roots
- Trespass → includes Boundary
Neighborhood in Abstraction Space¶
Trespass sits in a moderately populated region (55th percentile for distinctiveness): it has near-neighbors but no dense thicket of look-alikes.
Family — Unclustered & Miscellaneous (2769 abstractions)
Nearest neighbors
- Nuisance (Law) — 0.87
- Estate planning — 0.85
- Criminal Compounding of an Offence — 0.85
- Stand-your-ground law — 0.85
- Rule Against Perpetuities — 0.85
Computed from structural-signature embeddings · 2026-10-25