Legal Definition of Cause to

The main problem with the risky harm test does not lie in any of the directions we have just discussed in terms of predictability as a criterion. The criterion of harm in danger is at the service of a policy oriented towards justice in the search for a real determinant of the desert (guilty state of mind) and does not pose superfluous questions. In order to assess guilt based on mental states of intent, foresight and risk, we must attribute the damage caused to the nature of the intentional, anticipated or unreasonably risky harm. The real questions for the harm in risk test are why this question of guilt is called a problem of legal causation and whether this classification of culpable mental state is all that happens or should take place under the heading of “legal cause”. A criticism of the distance criterion often expressed in the legal literature is that distance in space and distance in time are irrelevant to the degree of causal contribution. Examples such as People v. Botkin, where poisoned candy traveled a long distance (from California to the victim in New Jersey) or an unexploded bomb that sat buried for many years before exploding and injuring a victim, are cited in support of the criticism. Justice Cardozo responded that such criticisms certainly run counter to the strong sense of community that spatio-temporal distance plays a role in the degree of causal contribution (Bird v. St. Paul F. and Minneapolis Ins.

Co.), but one would hope that it could be done better. Spatio-temporal distance can be a useful approximation of the number of events or states by which a cause influences its effects, and the number of events can be relevant to the degree of causal contribution. This is the metaphysical view that causality “gets tired” through its connections and that, in this way, the relationship is not completely transitive. In addition to these three factors (and given the caveat and the third point raised earlier to distinguish legal propositions from laws of law), there are theories about what causality means or should mean in law. Such theories have been proposed by legal theorists because they make statements about law. Such theories, despite their non-authoritative source, have played an important role in the history of thinking about the nature of causality in law. Some of these theories, to the extent that their content faithfully reflects legal principles, have even become part of the law of which they are theories (Raz 2012). The basic principle of taxonomization here is to separate tests that have no immediate causality like anything to do with actual causal relationships (the conventional view in legal theory) from tests motivated by opposing thought. We`ll start with the first type of testing, which should be called policy-based testing for immediate causes.

The political tests for immediate causes are themselves judiciously divided into two camps. Some – the policy criteria – are justified because they cover a wide range of directives, in fact as broad as the directives justifying liability in torts or criminal matters. In contrast, other tests serve only one policy: to measure the actor`s guilt in relation to the mental state he had or should have had when he acted. This Pigouvian view of tort law gave way to that of Ronald Coase after 1960: tort law does exist to achieve an efficient allocation of resources, but this effectiveness will be achieved regardless of whether or not tort liability follows causal liability. Coase`s key idea was that opportunity costs for economically rational actors are also real costs, so that a missed opportunity to accept a payment instead of harming another person already forces the polluter to “internalize” all the costs of his activities. Such a polluter does not need to be held liable for such damage in order to bear the “real costs” of its activities; He is already “paying” by giving up the possibility of being purchased by the person affected by the damage. Since each perpetrator and aggrieved party decides on the desired level of activity, he will thus take into account all the effects of his interaction, without the obligation of tort based on cause to do so (Coase 1960). A distant cause is a cause that is eliminated or separated from the immediate cause of an injury. If the injuries of a person admitted to hospital after being struck by a truck are aggravated by medical malpractice, medical malpractice is a distant cause of that person`s injury. The fact that the cause of a violation is eliminated does not relieve the defendant of liability for the act or omission, but there may be a sharing of liability between the defendants. The second type of case involves what are often referred to as “intervention” or “replacement” causes. Suppose the accused places explosives next to a prison wall with the intention of blowing up the wall and eliminating some inmates.

He predicts with practical certainty that the explosion will kill the security guard on the other side of the wall. He lights the fuse of the bomb and leaves. Randomly, the backup turns off. However, a stranger walks past the wall, sees the bomb and relights the fuse to see an explosion. Or, lightning strikes the fuse, ignites it and ignites the bomb. If the guard on the other side of the wall is killed by the explosion, standard doctrines of intrusive causation state that the defendant did not legally cause the death of the security guard. However, this is difficult to reconcile with the result that should apparently be achieved under the risky harm test. Did the defendant not foresee the nature of the damage that had occurred? Because the question of harm at risk poses a simple token-type question – was the particular harm that occurred a case of the kind of harm that the defendant made him guilty of foresight – the test is blind to the folly of the causal pathway (Moore 2009a: chap. 10). In this colossal analysis of tort law, it is simply not necessary for liability to activate causation. On the contrary, either tort liability is irrelevant to an efficient allocation of resources (in a world with low transaction costs), or tort liability should be placed on the least expensive that avoids costs (in a world with high transaction costs) to get that person to take precautions at low cost. In both cases, legal liability should not pursue causal liability, because even if transaction costs are high, the perpetrator of damage does not have to be the one to avoid the cheapest costs for that type of damage.

The general and positive recipe that is supposed to result from the skepticism of realists and right-wing critics is not so clear. It is believed that once skepticism (that causality is an objective fact) has removed the blinders, we can see that only interests and policies lead us to conclusions about moral responsibility and legal responsibility. So we can assume that the positive recipe is that we do it openly by weighing all the relevant political considerations to decide who should be responsible, and then drawing those conclusions in terms of responsibility in terms of what was the cause of what. These are the conclusions of the legal skeptics examined here. Such skeptics seem to deny that causality exists like any kind of natural relationship, whether it is a “glue-like” natural relationship, a regular agreement in nature, or something else. Since it is historically easier to approach such skepticism, I will start with the misnamed American right-wing realists (misnamed because they were in no way realists in the philosophical sense), from which almost all skepticism about immediate causality also flows. Each precursor of an event.