Information AboutCausation (law) |
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In Law , causation is the name given to the process of testing whether Defendant s should be fixed with liability for the outcome to their acts and Omissions that injure or cause loss to others. The following conceptual statement should be taken as sufficiently general to apply equally to Criminal Law , Tort and the general process of quantifying Damages in the Civil Law . THE CONCEPTS Most legal systems are to a greater or lesser extent concerned with the notions of Fairness and Justice . If a State is going to penalise a person or require that person to pay compensation to another for losses incurred, this imposition of liability will be derived from the idea that those who injure others should take responsibility for their actions. Although some parts of any legal system will have qualities of Strict Liability , most look to establish liability by showing that the defendant was the most Proximate Cause of the particular injury or loss. Even the youngest children quickly learn that, with varying degrees of probability, consequences flow from physical acts and omissions. The more predictable the outcome, the greater the likelihood that the actor caused the injury or loss intentionally. There are many ways in which the law might capture this simple rule of practical experience: that there is a natural flow to events, that a reasonable man in the same situation would have foreseen this consequence as likely to occur, that the loss flowed naturally from the breach of contractual or tortious duty, etc. However it is phrased, the essence of the degree of fault attributed will lie in the fact that reasonable people try to avoid injuring others so, if harm was foreseeable, there should be liability to the extent that the extent of the harm actually resulting was foreseeable. THE KEY PRINCIPLE The key principle is stated as ''novus actus interveniens''. This is Latin for "some new action breaking in". The assumption is that acts and omissions are linked together rather like a chain. If each link naturally leads to the next from a very early point in the sequence to the point where the injury is sustained, liability will be incurred. But if some external person or event interferes, this may break the chain and so prevent liability from being incurred for the full extent of the injuries caused. For example, A forms the intention to kill B and makes an attack resulting in B's removal to a hospital for treatment. A junior doctor then negligently treats B who dies. In this example, two people have combined to produce a situation in which another dies. Had it not been for A's attack, B would never had been taken to a hospital. Had it not been for the doctor's negligence, B would have survived. The effect of the principle may be stated simply: :if the new event, whether through human agency or natural causes, does not break the chain, the original actor is liable for all the consequences flowing naturally from the initial circumstances. But if the new act breaks the chain, the liability of the initial actor stops at that point, and the new actor, if human, will be liable for all that flows from his or her contribution. Hence, we are concerned with two interconnected subordinate questions derived from the following question: if two or more people are involved in causing the injury or loss caused to a victim, who represents the most proximate cause? #Is the test of proximity concerned only with the question of who among the many was the last one to make a contribution to the chain? #Is the test a qualitative evaluation of the contribution made by each actor to identify whose contribution was the most substantial? The first draws strength from the Criminal Law relating to Inchoate Offences . Here, the test of proximity relates to the need to prove that the accused has failed to commit the full offence but nevertheless represents a real danger to the public. Thus, the accused must have committed every step up to and including the penultimate step before the elements constituting the '' Actus Reus '' are present. If this was applied to causation generally, it would be a simple rule to apply. So, for example, in the Deception Offences , the Deception must be the operative cause of the ''obtaining'' and not too remote. If X deceives a handicapper into allowing a more favourable starting position in a race and then duly wins the race, the effective cause of obtaining the prize money is winning the race. The deception is merely a preparatory act which gives a better chance of winning. X might have won the race in any event. As applied to the situation where several actors contribute, the last act approach would fix the last person to act in the chain with the liability for all that follows, no matter what its origin. But this fails to consider whether the last actor's behaviour made any significant contribution to the impetus towards the particular outcome. It might be that, no matter what the last actor had done, the injury or loss would have been sustained. Thus, the more fair system would adopt a qualitative analysis to determine which among the actors has made the most substantial contribution to the flow of events naturally leading to the injury or loss. THE PRINCIPLE APPLIED Factual analysis To be acceptable, any rule of law must be capable of being applied consistently so a definition of the criteria for this qualitative analysis must be supplied. Let us assume a purely factual analysis as a starting point. A injures B and leaves him lying in the road. C is a driver who fails to see B on the road and, by running over him, contributes to the cause of his death. It would be possible to ask for a detailed medical evaluation at a Post Mortem to determine the initial degree of injury and the extent to which B's life was threatened, followed by a second set of injuries from the collision and their contribution. If the first incident merely damaged B's leg so that he could not move, it is tempting to assert that C's driving must have been the more substantial cause and so represents a ''novus actus'' breaking the chain. Equally, if B was bleeding to death and the only contribution that the driving made was to break B's arm, the driving is not a ''novus actus'' and does not break the chain. But this approach ignores the issue of A's foresight. Roads are, by their nature, used by vehicles and it is clearly foreseeable that a person left lying on the road is at risk of being further injured by an inattentive driver. Hence, if A leaves B on the road with knowledge of that risk and the foreseen event occurs, A remains the more proximate cause. This leaves whether the test of foresight should be subjective, objective or hybrid (i.e. both subjective and objective). Obviously, there is no difficulty in holding A liable if A had actual knowledge of the likelihood that B would be further injured by a driver. The fault which caused the initial injury is compounded by the omission to move B to a safer place or call for assistance. But let us assume that A never adverts to the possibility of further injury. The issue is now the extent to which knowledge may be Imputed objectively. Foreseeability test Some aspects of the physical world are so inevitable that it is always reasonable to Impute knowledge of their incidence. So if A abandons B on a beach, A must be taken to foresee that the tide comes in and goes out. But the mere fact that B subsequently drowns is not enough. A court would have to consider where the body was left and what level of injury A believed that B had suffered. If B was left in a position that any Reasonable Person would consider safe but a Storm Surge caused extensive flooding throughout the area, this might be a ''novus actus''. That B was further injured by an event within a foreseen class does not of itself require a court to hold that every incident falling within that class is a natural link in the chain. Only those causes that are reasonably foreseeable fit naturally into the chain. So if A had heard a weather forecast predicting a storm, the drowning will be a natural outcome. But if this was an event like a Flash Flood , an entirely unpredictable event, it will be a ''novus actus''. The question of A's beliefs is no different. If A honestly believes that B is only slightly injured and so could move himself out of danger without difficulty, how fair is it to say that he ''ought'' to have foreseen? The test is what the reasonable person would have known and foreseen, given what A had done. It is the function of any court to evaluate behaviour. A defendant cannot evade responsibility through a form of wilful blindness. Fault lies not only in what a person actually believes, but also in failing to understand what the vast majority of other people would have understood. Hence, the test is hybrid, looking both at what the defendant actually knew and foresaw (i.e. subjective), and at what the reasonable person would have known (i.e. objective) and then combining the conclusions into a general evaluation of the degree of fault or blameworthiness. Similarly, in the quantification of damages generally and/or the partitioning of damages between two or more defendants, the extent of the liability to compensate the plaintiff(s) will be determined what was reasonably foreseeable. So if, for example, the plaintiff unexpectedly contributed to the extent of the loss suffered, that additional element would not be included in the damages award even though the plaintiff would not have had the opportunity to make this mistake had it not been for the defendant's breach. In cases involving the partitioning of damages between multiple defendants, each will be liable to the extent that their contribution foreseeably produced the loss. ENGLISH CRIMINAL CASE LAW EXAMPLES ''Novus actus interveniens
:Even though negligence in the treatment of the victim was the immediate cause of his death, the jury should not regard it as excluding the responsibility of the accused unless the negligent treatment was so independent of his acts, and in itself so potent in causing death, that they regard the contribution made by his acts as insignificant.
Foreseeability
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