Module duty_of_inquiry 

Duty of inquiry — expectations that define negligence.

The consideration (Timothy, 2026-07-06): staff in mental-health (and other welfare) facilities are rarely experts, and often cannot understand complex, specialised, international, or secrecy-bound work. A real specialist’s real work can look like grandiosity to someone who cannot verify it. Fairness therefore cannot require them to understand — but it can require them to check the means when means are available. This sets an expectation, and the expectation is what defines negligence:

Failure to check, even given the means to do so, then acts that cause further injury = negligence.

And it keeps negligence fair by distinguishing it from the neighbours:

• No fault — the means were genuinely not accessible; the actor could not reasonably have known.
• Negligent — accessible means were not checked, and a harmful act followed.
• (Malfeasance — checked / knew and harmed anyway, or wilfully avoided checking to keep deniability — is beyond this inquiry primitive; it is the intent case in the accountability spectrum.)

The “means to check” are exactly what the rest of the fabric provides: verifiable credentials, the durable disclosure/conduct records, and a person’s TransparencyInvocation (offering their prior-events record to be checked). This module is the pure classifier; it composes with the social-worker accountability spectrum (docs/plans/social-worker-support-and-accountability.md §3).

Structs

ConductAgainstDuty

What actually happened, against the duty.

DutyOfInquiry

The duty: a consequential act is expected to be preceded by checking the relevant means. Sets the expectation against which negligence is measured.

MeansToCheck

A means by which an actor could verify a relevant fact before acting — a verifiable credential, a durable record, a transparency invocation the person offered. Carries whether it was reasonably accessible to the actor at the relevant time (given to them, or checkable with the means they had). If it was not accessible, not-checking it is not negligence.

Enums

InquiryVerdict

The fair classification of a shortfall — the locus, tying the accountability spectrum.

Functions

assess

Classify conduct against a duty of inquiry. Deterministic; the criteria are the definition above.