Real scandals by the dozen, and beneath them a small, repeating vocabulary of failure. A field guide to how public power goes wrong — each form, and the cases that wear it.
The corpus began as one case at a time. Somewhere around the twentieth it became plain the cases were not all different: they kept taking the same few structural shapes, the way stories keep reaching for the same few devices. Two short vocabularies catch almost all of them — the shapes a wrong's structure takes, and the kernel's own fourteen threats, the ways power fails that the design was drawn against before any of these cases were written. Click any case to read it in full.
44 scenarios · 6 shapes · 14 threats in play · nothing cherry-picked
Six structural forms the institutional-failure cases keep taking — the cross-cutting tropes the triage engine sorts by. Most wrongs wear more than one.
wrong lives in an aggregate of individually-lawful acts.
the act was never recorded contemporaneously.
Awaiting a scenario: drc-medical-detention.
the record was made, then destroyed.
Awaiting a scenario: infected-blood-coverup.
the record exists but access is by-permission and slow-walkable.
the wrong is a non-decision, which leaves nothing to challenge.
a document requirement excludes people from a right.
The intersections — where two forms co-occur, the web made literal:
The kernel's own vocabulary: fourteen enumerated ways power fails, named before the design was drawn (§2). Every stress-test carries the threats it exercises.
Small on purpose, and honestly thin. Six shapes, not six hundred — the point is that the vocabulary is short, because a short vocabulary of failure is what lets a thin protocol be drawn against it at all. And the sample is one legal culture: these are mostly British institutions, so this may be the grammar of UK injustice more than a universal one — a limit the comparative corpus only begins to test. The shapes cover the institutional-failure cases the triage engine has sorted; the fourteen threats tag every stress-test. Where a case appears under more than one heading, that is the point — the web, not a filing cabinet.