From Caparo to Lehman Brothers Legal Exclusion, Institutional Consequence, and the Geometry of Collapse

This working paper develops a structural pathway for reading institutional consequence beyond the limits of individualized legal liability. It begins from the jurisprudential problem exposed by Caparo Industries plc v Dickman: where private-law responsibility is denied because a representation is not directed to a sufficiently determinate individual or class, the legal exclusion of an individualized claim does not eliminate the broader institutional consequence generated by that representation. The paper argues that this remaining consequence must be read at another level. The paper builds a layered framework linking tort, institutional consequence, ITI, IDI, Fiscal Geometry, and FGC. Tort is treated as a first institutional filter: it receives diffuse social events and determines whether they can enter legal form as individualized claims. Where consequence is filtered out at that level, it may continue to circulate structurally. ITI reads this persistence as institutional tension; IDI reads it as distortion between visible form and underlying condition. These intermediate layers are then reabsorbed into Fiscal Geometry, where institutional viability is expressed through the multiplicative function FGC = X × Y. Using Lehman Brothers as a negative institutional demonstration, the paper reconstructs X as front-end expansion and rolling execution capacity, and Y as back-end absorptive integrity and institutional closure capacity. The model shows why institutional survival cannot be read through additive strength alone. If either axis approaches zero, overall going-concern capacity approaches collapse regardless of visible strength on the other axis. The paper therefore reframes collapse not as sudden panic or post hoc narrative, but as the failure of jointly necessary orthogonal capacities within a structured field of consequence. Keywords: Fiscal Geometry; Structural Fiscalistics; Caparo; Lehman Brothers; institutional consequence; legal exclusion; ITI; IDI; FGC; institutional collapse; going concern; tort; structural readout; institutional viability.