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Do you need help understanding proximate cause?
Is the concept as clear as mud?
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Hi, this is Beau Baez, and today I want to discuss proximate cause, which is sometimes
called legal cause.
In every tort, a plaintiff must prove that the defendant was not only the actual cause
of the injury, but also the proximate cause.
Proximate cause requires the plaintiff’s harm to be a reasonably foreseeable consequence
of the defendant’s wrongful action.
In a negligence case, there must be a relatively close connection between the defendant’s
breach of duty and the harm that occurred.
Proximate cause is sometimes difficult for students to grasp because it can be used to
eliminate liability for a negligent defendant who caused the harm to the plaintiff.
You are probably asking: why would the law eliminate liability for someone who was at
fault in causing the plaintiff’s injury?
In very rare cases, the events leading to the injury are freakish, remote, or improbable;
or, there may be a superseding intervening event that injured the plaintiff.
In these cases, the defendant is not the proximate cause of the injury, even though all the other
elements are met.
When deciding if someone is not the proximate cause of an injury, the law looks for an unforeseeable
type of injury or superseding intervening event.
A superseding intervening event is another term for an unforeseeable intervening event.
When examining an unforeseeable type of injury, the law ignores the unforeseeable manner or
extent of injury.
For example, in one case, the owner of a building negligently maintained an exposed pilot light,
which had the potential to cause a fire.
One would have expected the carpet or someone’s clothes to catch on fire,
but instead, in this case, a rat
ran by the exposed flame, its fur caught on fire, it ran into a hole, and the building
caught on fire, causing damage to the plaintiff’s property in his apartment.
Now, though the manner of how the building caught on fire was unforeseeable, it was still a foreseeable
consequence that the owner’s negligence would result in a fire.
Therefore, the owner was the proximate cause of the fire.
Also, the law ignores the unforeseeable extent of injury in what is called the eggshell plaintiff
rule.
For example, if someone negligently backs into the car of a 95 year old, causing her
outrageously high medical bills, the defendant is still the proximate cause of the injury
as you take the plaintiff as you find them.
In real life, plaintiffs prove proximate cause 99.99% of the time.
In other words, proximate cause isn’t difficult to prove.
So why do we spend so much time discussing a topic that has so little real-world application?
Because proximate cause is the darling of law professors and bar examiners.
Let’s work through a fact pattern.
Duffy is in the road construction business, and uses boiling enamel as part of the construction
process.
Duffy sets up a cauldron near a busy road, but he fails to set up any barriers in front
of the boiling enamel.
He also fails to place a person in front of the enamel to direct traffic away from it.
As to the Duty element, Duffy had a duty to act reasonably under the circumstances.
Second, Duffy breached his duty because a reasonable person would have taken a few basic
precautions, like placing a barrier around the boiling enamel and placing a couple of
people with flags on the road to get people to slow down.
Under these facts, Duffy clearly acted unreasonably.
Suppose though that instead of a car crashing through and hitting the enamel,
we have an airplane with engine problems.
Pilot sees the road, has to land somewhere.
And he lands at a point near Duffy, at which point the boiling enamel splashes on
Perry.
Under these facts Duffy isn’t the proximate cause of the harm because the airplane was
a superseding intervening event that broke the causal link.
In real life, injuries are almost always a foreseeable consequence of the negligent
conduct.
If someone is speeding down the road, the foreseeable consequence is an injured pedestrian
or another car.
If a waiter fails to clean up some water that he spilled near some tables, it's reasonably
foreseeable that someone is going to slip and fall.
If an airplane mechanic fails to put enough oil into an airplane’s engine, it's reasonably
foreseeable that the plane will crash.
On an exam, always mention proximate cause in its own paragraph after you establish actual
cause.
When the harm is foreseeable, three to four sentences will suffice.
But if the fact pattern deals with an unforeseeable type of harm or unforeseeable intervening
event, then you need to discuss proximate cause in more detail.
Don’t forget that reasonable minds can differ in these cases, so pick one side or the other and explain
why you believe the defendant is or is not the proximate cause.
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Thanks for watching.