Forfeiture

The suspension of a boundary's protection, caused by crossing the same boundary of another. Rights bind reciprocally: to claim a right is to owe the identical right to every agent like you, so an agent who crosses another's boundary without consent withdraws, by that act, the protection of their own -- to the measure of the harm caused, and no further. Forfeiture is not granted, voted, or declared. Like Guilt, it exists objectively from causation; a Judgment discovers it, never creates it. Forfeiture is what lets force answer harm without making the answer a new crime. Harm within a forfeited boundary has no Victim in the normative sense: the agent is harmed in fact -- the descriptive sense -- but no protected boundary was crossed, so there is no violation, no new guilt, and no new moral debt. This is why the defender, the punisher acting within Mandate and Proportion, and the ender of an Outlaw commit no crime, while the same acts against an intact boundary would be crimes. Forfeiture runs in three phases. While a crossing is ongoing or immediately credible, the aggressor's protection is forfeit, toward anyone, to the minimum force needed to halt it, as in self-defense. Once the harm is done, the forfeiture is held by the victim: it extends to the Proportion of the harm caused and may be exercised only by the victim or a proxy within their Mandate. When the offender has destroyed the victim -- as in Murder -- the forfeiture is left with no holder to bound, exercise, or release it, and it becomes general and permanent; such an agent is an Outlaw. Forfeiture is exactly as large as the harm that created it. Force beyond that measure crosses an intact boundary: the excess is a new crime with a new victim, and the escalator becomes an aggressor. Forfeiture ends when Justice closes the moral debt by collection or release; after that, the former offender's boundaries stand whole again, and harming them creates a victim like any other. A forfeiture that was never real protects no one who acts on it: punishing the wrong agent, or ending one mistaken for an Outlaw, crosses an intact boundary, and responsibility for that harm follows causation -- falling on a deceiver who procured the act by fraud, and otherwise on the actor, whatever they believed.