proximate cause

Definition of proximate cause

Noun

proximate cause (plural proximate causes)

1. (law) An event which, in a natural and continuous sequence, unbroken by any efficient intervening cause, produces an injury, and without which the injury would not have occurred.

Further reading

In the law, a proximate cause is an event sufficiently related to a legally recognizable injury to be held the cause of that injury. There are two types of causation in the law, cause-in-fact and proximate (or legal) cause. Cause-in-fact is determined by the "but for" test: but for the action, the result would not have happened. For example, but for running the red light, the collision would not have occurred. For an act to cause a harm, both tests must be met; proximate cause is a legal limitation on cause-in-fact.

But for test

A few circumstances exist where the but for test is complicated, or the test is ineffective. The primary examples are:

• Concurrent causes. Where two separate acts of negligence combine to cause an injury to a third party, each actor is liable. For example, a construction worker negligently leaves the cover off a manhole, and a careless driver negligently clips a pedestrian, forcing the pedestrian to fall into the open manhole. Both the construction worker and the careless driver are equally liable for the injury to the pedestrian. This example obeys the but for test. The injury could have been avoided by the elimination of either act of negligence, thus each is a but for cause of the injury.
• Sufficient combined causes. Where an injury results from two separate acts of negligence, either of which would have been sufficient to cause the injury, both actors are liable. For example, two campers in different parts of the woods negligently leave their campfires unattended. A forest fire results, but the same amount of property damage would have resulted from either fire. Both campers are equally liable for all damage. A famous case establishing this principle in the United States is Corey v. Havener.
• In the United States, the rule of Summers v. Tice holds that where two parties have acted unreasonably, but only one causes an injury to a third party, the burden shifts to the negligent parties to prove that they were not the cause of the injury. In that case, two hunters negligently fired their shotguns in the direction of their guide, and a pellet lodged in his eye. Because it was impossible to tell which hunter fired the shot that caused the injury, the court held both hunters liable.
• Market share evidence. Injury or illness is occasioned by a fungible product made by all the manufacturers joined together in a lawsuit. The injury or illness is due to a design hazard, with each having been found to have sold the same type of product in a manner that made it unreasonably dangerous, there is inability to identify the specific manufacturer of the product or products that brought about the Plaintiff's injury or illness and there are enough of manufacturers of the fungible product joined in the lawsuit, to represent a substantial share of the market. Any damages would then be divided according to the market share ratio.

Problems with "but for" causation

Since but-for causation is very easy to show and does not assign culpability (but for the rain, you would not have crashed your car - the rain is not morally or legally culpable but still constitutes a cause), there is a second test used to determine if an action is close enough to a harm in a "chain of events" to be a legally culpable cause of the harm. This test is called proximate cause.

There are several competing theories of proximate cause.

• Foreseeability
  The most common test of proximate cause under the American legal system is foreseeability. It determines if the harm resulting from an action was reasonably able to be predicted. The test is used in most cases only in respect to the type of harm.
• Direct Causation
  Direct causation is a minority test, which addresses only the metaphysical concept of causation. The main thrust of direct causation is that there are no intervening causes between an act and the resulting harm. An intervening cause has several requirements: it must 1) be independent of the original act, 2) be a voluntary human act or an abnormal natural event, and 3) occur in time between the original act and the harm.
• Risk enhancement/causal link
  The plaintiff must demonstrate that the defendant's action increased the risk that the particular harm suffered by the plaintiff would occur. If the action were repeated, the likelihood of the harm would correspondingly increase. This is also called foreseeable risk.
• Harm Within the Risk
  The Harm Within the Risk (HWR) test determines whether the victim was among the class of persons who could foreseeably be harmed, and whether the harm was foreseeable within the class of risks. It is the strictest test of causation, made famous by Benjamin Cardozo in Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad Co. case under New York state law.
• The "Risk Rule"
  Referred to by the Reporters of the Second and Third Restatements of the Law of Torts as the "scope-of-the-risk" test, the term "Risk Rule" was coined by Harvard Law Professor Robert Keeton. The rule is that “[a]n actor's liability is limited to those physical harms that result from the risks that made the actor's conduct tortious.” Thus, the operative question is "what were the particular risks that made an actor's conduct negligent?" If the injury suffered is not among those risks, there can be no recovery.