Legal Causation Tort Definition

Notwithstanding the fact that causation can be established in the above-mentioned situations, the law often intervenes and says that it nevertheless does not hold the defendant liable because, in the circumstances, it cannot be presumed that the defendant caused the damage in the legal sense. In the United States, this is called the doctrine of the immediate cause. The most important doctrine is that of novus actus interveniens, which means a «new intermediate act» that can «break the causal chain.» Causality: counterfactual theories of | Causality: | probabilistic Causality: the metaphysics of | Moral responsibility| While it can be argued that causality in law has nothing to do with causality in science and everyday life (other than the use of the same word), such a view is very counterintuitive; There is certainly some relationship between the two concepts of causality. This leaves two more plausible views on this relationship. A strong vision of this relationship would be that the concepts are the same. The three unified tests of legal causation considered last, and the two aforementioned metaphysical views of immediate causality, would all make such a strong relationship plausible. A weaker view of this relationship would be to consider one part of the legal concept of causality—»cause in fact»—as the same as causality in science and everyday life, but to consider the other part—»immediate causality»—as the conclusions of political analyses that have nothing to do with anything that could be considered causality in an ordinary sense. In this scenario, it appears that Hall`s strategy will wrongly exclude Jay`s driving at t1 as the cause of Myrtle`s injury, as Jay`s driving is not required for sufficient conditions, let alone a single set of sufficient conditions, for Myrtle`s injury. Instead, any set of conditions sufficient to t1 must include Daisy (because Jay alone will not break Myrtle`s leg if he continues at a speed of five miles per hour), and Jay will be useless for the relevance of such a sentence (because Daisy alone will break Myrtle`s leg if she continues at a speed of twenty miles per hour). The matter is further complicated by the fact that Jay appears to be a cause of Myrtle`s injury at t2, as Jay and Daisy are sufficient together at this point, but individually insufficient for Myrtle`s injury (as both t2 riders only drive five miles per hour). To solve these problems, the sufficiency theorist will probably have to clarify or revise her account; while Hall is convinced that such optimizations are possible,85×85. Paul & Hall, op. cit.

cit., note 43, p. 130. In their absence, a good degree of skepticism is appropriate.86×86. One possible solution might be to assume as a fundamental question that causality is transitive, in which case Jay`s driving at t1 will be a cause of Myrtle`s injury because Jay`s driving at t2 is a cause of Myrtle`s injury (as discussed above), and Jay`s driving at t1 is a cause of Jay`s driving at t2. Although the transitivity of causality certainly seems intuitive, see Ned Hall, Causation and the Price of Transitivity, 97 J. Phil. 198, 198 (2000) («This causality is necessarily a transitive relation to events, seems to many to be a fundamental date, one of the few a priori indisputable ideas we have about the functioning of the concept.»), it is not self-evident. Counterfactual dependence, after all, is notoriously non-transitive. For an illustration that has unfortunately become topical, see Maudlin, a.

Footnote 44, p. 27 («If the earth had exploded in 1987, Ivana would not have heard of Marla. If Ivana hadn`t heard of Marla, Trump would be a happier man now. In the normal context, both are true. It does not follow that if the earth had exploded, Trump would be happier. Moreover, attempts to reconcile doctrine with cases of overdetermination and pre-emption are generally unsuccessful. Such attempts often attempt to redefine the victim`s wound in a «fine-grained» 26×26. Michael Moore, What Do We Have to Pay? Causation and Counterfactual Baselines, 40 San Diego L. Rev. 1181, 1237 (2003). 27×27.

See, for example, Arno C. Becht & Frank W. Miller, The Test of Factual Causation in Negligence and Strict Liability Cases 16–18 (1961). In the above cases, for example, Myrtle`s injury would be redefined based on the particular way her leg is broken; so defined that it may no longer be true that Myrtle`s injury would have occurred without Jay`s negligent conduct (because the injury wouldn`t have happened exactly the same way if Myrtle had only been hit by Daisy), and Jay could rightly be called the actual cause. While this strategy is intuitively appealing, it encounters several problems, the most fatal of which is that the scenarios of overdetermination and preemption can be revised so that a victim`s injury occurred exactly as it would have been if the perpetrator concerned had not acted. Such an overhaul requires a certain creativity in physical wounds,28×28. In the case of pre-purchase, we could imagine Jay and Daisy driving cars of the same make and model, and we could also imagine that Daisy would have driven at exactly the same speed, in the same place, at exactly the same time in Jay`s absence. Some may argue that in any scenario there will inevitably be subtle differences between Myrtle`s injury (perhaps because the weights or speeds of the two cars would have been slightly different), but with a little imagination, we can always revise the scenarios to eliminate these differences. See Ben Gifford, State v. Brelo and the Problem of Actual Causation, 44 am. J.

Crim. L. (forthcoming 2017) (manuscript 25-31), ssrn.com/abstract=2850558 [perma.cc/KP8B-V4AY]. In other cases, however, it is trivially simple, such as fraudulent misrepresentation.29×29. For example, we might assume that Jay and Daisy – instead of being negligent drivers – are scammers who trick Myrtle into investing their savings in a fraudulent business. If Myrtle had relied solely on one or the other motivation, any economic loss she would suffer would be exactly the same if neither Jay`s nor Daisy`s illegal conduct occurred. See Restatement (Second) of Torts § 525 (Am. Law Inst. 1977) («A person who fraudulently misrepresents facts, opinions, intentions or laws in order to induce another person to act or refrain from acting in reliance on those acts is liable to the other person for the material harm suffered by him as a result of his legitimate expectation of misrepresentation.»).