Causation: Actual and Proximate: every key term you need (+ practice quiz)
25 flashcard terms for Torts Topic 5, written to match the course framework. Study them here, then drill them as interactive flashcards, or test yourself with the 15-question quiz — free, no account needed.
The factual link between the defendant's conduct and the plaintiff's harm. Without this actual connection, no liability attaches no matter how careless the conduct was.
But-for test
The standard inquiry for factual cause: would the plaintiff's harm have occurred but for the defendant's negligent act? If the harm happens anyway, factual cause fails.
Substantial factor test
An alternative to but-for causation used when two or more forces each contribute to a single harm. A defendant is liable if its conduct was a material element in producing the result.
Multiple sufficient causes
Two independent forces, each alone adequate to cause the entire harm, converge on the plaintiff. But-for logic would excuse both, so courts hold each actor responsible.
Anderson v. Minneapolis, St. Paul & Sault Ste. Marie Railway
Merging fires case in which a railroad spark fire joined a fire of unknown origin. The court rejected a but-for escape hatch and imposed liability on the negligent source.
Alternative liability
Where a small closed set of defendants all acted negligently but only one caused the injury, each must exculpate itself or share liability. Common in two-hunter fact patterns.
Summers v. Tice burden shift
Two hunters fired negligently toward the plaintiff and only one pellet struck him. California shifted the burden of disproving causation onto each defendant.
Market share liability
A theory apportioning responsibility among makers of a fungible product by their share of the relevant market when the plaintiff cannot identify the specific manufacturer.
Sindell v. Abbott Laboratories
DES litigation that created market share apportionment because daughters injured in utero could not identify which of many identical drug makers supplied the dose.
Concert of action
Joint responsibility imposed on parties who agree to a tortious plan or substantially assist one another, such as drag racers, even if only one inflicted the blow.
Loss of chance doctrine
In medical cases, permits recovery when a physician's failure reduced an already poor survival probability, treating the destroyed chance itself as the compensable interest.
Herskovits v. Group Health
Washington decision allowing suit where delayed cancer diagnosis dropped survival odds from about thirty-nine percent to twenty-five percent, below the traditional threshold.
Lost chance damages measure
Most courts multiply the full wrongful death award by the percentage of survival chance destroyed, rather than granting all or nothing recovery.
Epidemiological proof of causation
Statistical population studies offered to show that an agent raises disease incidence. Many courts require a relative risk above two before inferring specific causation.
Specific causation
Proof that the defendant's agent caused this individual plaintiff's disease, as distinct from general causation, which shows only that the agent can cause the disease.
Daubert standard
Federal gatekeeping rule requiring trial judges to assess expert reliability by testability, peer review, error rate, standards, and acceptance in the relevant field.
Proximate cause
The legal limit on liability, now often called scope of liability, that cuts off responsibility for factually caused consequences too remote or unrelated to the risk taken.
Directness test
An older approach holding a negligent actor answerable for all harm flowing in an unbroken sequence from the wrongful act, regardless of how surprising the extent proved.
In re Polemis
English case where a dropped plank sparked and destroyed a ship. Liability followed because the damage flowed directly from careless handling, though fire was unexpected.
Wagon Mound foreseeability test
Privy Council ruling that displaced directness with foreseeability: liability extends only to the kinds of harm a reasonable person would anticipate from the careless act.
Palsgraf relational duty
Cardozo held that a defendant owes obligations only to those within the foreseeable zone of danger, so the distant plaintiff struck by falling scales could not recover.
Andrews dissent in Palsgraf
Argues obligation runs to the world at large and that limits belong to proximate cause, judged by directness, remoteness in time and space, and practical policy.
Eggshell skull rule
A tortfeasor takes the victim as found and pays for the full aggravated injury caused by a hidden frailty, even though the severity was wholly unforeseeable.
Unforeseeable extent versus unforeseeable type
Liability survives when the degree of harm exceeds expectation but is usually cut off when the kind of harm differs from the risk that made the conduct careless.
Harm within the risk analysis
The modern scope inquiry asking whether the injury that occurred is among the hazards that made the actor's conduct negligent in the first place.