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In discussing negligence, the elements so far have been pretty straight forward. You have a duty to other people who you breached; they had damages and you are liable for those damages. Unfortunately, there is one more element a lawyer has to prove for a jury to find he or she met all the elements of the common law definition of negligence. You have to prove causation.
This may sound simple, but, oh, it can be complicated. Just because you were driving and crashed into my car thus injuring me, does not necessarily mean that my particular injuries were caused by your failing to drive in a reasonable manner. What if you and I only had a fender bender, but because we were parked by the edge of the road, a semi-truck crashed into us moments later, injuring us severely. Who caused this? Also what if we had the accident, which you caused, but I died of a heart attack because of the stress? Are you the cause of my heart attack?
This is the gray legal area of causation. Lawyers make their money arguing these distinctions because this is where you have some flexibility to sway a jury. Causation is a key element of a negligence claim, but it can get very convoluted.
The first part of causation is the “but for” cause. This is a fairly simple concept to grasp. But for your breach of a duty to me I have damages. You crashed your car into mine and I was injured. Easy. Now for the hard part – legal or proximate causation.
“Proximate cause” is a legal term where the attorney uses various legal tests to determine whether the “but for” cause of the injury was the direct result of the damages of the injured party.
This may seem like a no brainer, but it isn’t, because sometimes events intervene which completely muddy the waters. In fact, sometimes the chain of causation can be so convoluted as to seem like the fanciful contraptions imagined by the late Rube Goldberg. You’ve seen them: a ball is dropped, which triggers dominoes to fall, which leads to a balloon filling with helium and rising up to bump a board balancing a grapefruit, which falls onto a teeter-totter, which flings a melon at an open door, which is closed by the impact. The goal is to close the door but Rube Goldberg would take 25 steps to get there.
There is no way that the law is so complicated you say? Let me tell you about the most famous case where proximate cause was tested. It was called Palsgraff v. Long Island Railway Co. It happened over 100 years ago in New York. A woman (Mrs. Palsgraff) sued a railroad because she was injured on a train platform. Simple so far, right? Here is where it gets fun.
Mrs. Palsgraff was injured when a luggage scale owned by the railroad fell on her. It fell on her because there was an explosion in the train station which caused the scale to fly across the platform to land on Mrs. Palsgraff. The explosion was caused because another passenger was carrying a bag of explosives, (I know, who carries explosives on a train? But this was a 100 years ago so maybe carrying dynamite was a hip thing to do back then.) The passenger with the explosives was trying to catch a train leaving the station. An employee of the railroad tried to help by pushing the passenger onto the moving train. The shove caused the passenger to drop the bag of explosives, which fell under the train and exploded, which flung the luggage scale across the platform to hit poor Mrs. Palsgraff. Remember Mrs. Palsgraff? This is a story about Mrs. Palsgraff.
Anyhow, Mrs Palsgraff (or her heirs) sued the railroad. The railroad claimed that the act of the employee trying to help the passenger get on the train was not the cause of Mrs. Palsgraff’s injuries. The New York Supreme Court, which had some judicial heavy hitters, disagreed with the railroad. and came up with a new test. It allowed that the employee shoving one passenger causing an unexpected explosion which injured another passenger was foreseeable and that a passenger like Mrs. Palsgraff was part of a class (passengers) who would likely be injured by such an explosion. Therefore Mrs. Palsgraff was able to recover for her injuries.
You may ask, “Wasn’t the passenger with the explosives more responsible?” The answer is yes, but a discussion of the term “judgment proof” will have to wait for another day. For now, just know that the law can be very complicated, and even a minor accident can leave you liable for much greater damages than you expected. For example, the egg-shell skull legal theory…..but that too I shall leave for another discussion.
The take away from this? You should understand that even though the law may sometimes seem simple, years and years of judicial activism has created a system were what would seemingly be common sense is often far from it. “But for” lawyers and their Goldbergian legal inventions, perhaps the law would be simple, but who could have foreseen the invention of proximate cause? Only a lawyer for sure.