Category Archives: Causation
Anat Lior, ‘The “Accident Network”: A Network Theory Analysis of Proximate Causation’
ABSTRACT In torts, proximate causation, or legal cause, examines whether a harmful negligent conduct is ‘closely enough related’ to the damages ensued. Tort professors often use the metaphor of a stone being thrown into a pond to explain this rather amorphous legal doctrine. The ripples the stone creates surrounding it are the direct result of […]
Stephen Paul, ‘Proving Causation in Clinical Research Negligence’
ABSTRACT Investigators conducting clinical research create a risk of harm to their human subjects. The common law recognizes a variety of duties that these investigators owe to their subjects. When they breach these duties, such as by negligently designing the study or failing to obtain informed consent, subjects who experience a negative outcome relative to […]
Horia Tarnovanu, ‘Causal Stability in Moral Contexts’
“Understanding the causal course of nature as a complex, seamless structure of interactions exposes causal claims to a basic form of indeterminacy: under an analysis attentive to increasingly broader causal ramifications, it is simply indeterminate which cause or causal pathway in the antecedent network of determiners brings about a target-effect. Any singular target-consequence appears to […]
Sara Golru, ‘The Challenge of Proving Toxic Tort Causation: Genetic Markers as the Solution?’
ABSTRACT Sara Golru, in ‘The Challenge of Proving Toxic Tort Causation: Genetic Markers as the Solution?’, presents a comparative analysis of the role of genetic marker evidence in toxic tort cases throughout Australia and the United States. Sara identifies inconsistencies in the approach of Australian courts to genetic evidence of causation, and considers how developments […]
Güver and Kneer, ‘Causation and the Silly Norm Effect’
ABSTRACT In many spheres, the law takes the legal concept of causation to correspond to the folk concept (the correspondence assumption). Courts, including the US Supreme Court, tend to insist on the ‘common understanding’ and that which is ‘natural to say’ (Burrage v United States) when it comes to expressions relating to causation, and frequently […]
Maytal Gilboa, ‘Linking Gains to Wrongs’
ABSTRACT This article provides a theoretical and doctrinal explanation of how the but-for test links gains to the wrong that produced them. Gain-based damages cases focus on the gain resulting from the defendant’s tortious behaviour. In these cases, the contrastive aspect of the but-for test, requiring the factfinder to consider the hypothetical result that would […]
Thomas Herbert, ‘A look at Thorley v Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust: material contribution and adverse inferences’
“Judgment in the clinical negligence case of Thorley v Sandwell and West Birmingham NHS Trust was handed down by Soole J on 1 October 2021. This article looks at two interesting points arising from that decision. First, it examines Soole J’s decision on causation that, as a matter of law, the material contribution approach does […]
Neil Foster, ‘Material Contribution in Bonnington: Not An Exception To “But For” Causation’
ABSTRACT The courts have wrestled for some years with what Lord Reid meant in Bonnington Castings Ltd v Wardlaw [1956] AC 613 when he said that ‘[the plaintiff] must make it appear at least that on a balance of probabilities the breach of duty caused or materially contributed to his injury’. Some have taken this […]
Liang Zhao, ‘Insurer’s liability under concurrent causation: English law and Chinese law compared’
ABSTRACT This paper examines the different regimes of insurer liability under concurrent causation in English law and Chinese law. The analysis shows that neither English law nor Chinese law is satisfactory in terms of the insurer’s liability in such cases. It is argued that only one proximate cause should be identified among multiple causes except […]
Richard Goldberg, ‘Vaccine damage schemes in the US and UK reappraised: making them fit for purpose in the light of Covid-19’
ABSTRACT Vaccines have continued to play a crucial global role in preventing infectious diseases in the twenty-first century. The Covid-19 pandemic has underlined their importance, with vaccines seen as the best way to protect the public from coronavirus. A longstanding problem of governments has been the extent to which they should assume responsibility for the […]