"Consent, Coercion, Reasonableness, and Collective Responsibility: The Option‑Set Structure of Legal Agency"

This paper introduces the option‑set as the structural foundation underlying four major legal doctrines: consent, coercion, reasonableness, and collective responsibility. Although these doctrines are taught and applied as distinct, each attempts to answer the same unarticulated question: what actions were meaningfully available to the actor at the moment of decision? Drawing on Relational Structuralism (RS), the paper formalizes the option‑set as the dynamic field of viable actions shaped by relational, social, institutional, and narrative forces.By making this structure explicit, the paper reveals that the doctrines are not separate categories but surface manifestations of different deformations of the option‑set: consent reflects an open field of options; coercion, a collapsed one; reasonableness, an external reconstruction; and collective responsibility, a synchronized field shared across individuals.The option‑set framework resolves longstanding doctrinal inconsistencies, clarifies the role of power and context in shaping agency, and provides courts with a unified analytic tool that enhances coherence without altering existing doctrine. This structural model reframes legal analysis by making visible the architecture that legal reasoning has always relied on but never named.