Opinion ID: 2432554
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Heading: Development of Causation

Text: A few words about the historical development of causation analysis in American jurisprudence provide a helpful context. [1] Throughout much of the nineteenth century, the doctrine of objective causation was the predominant theory of causation. See Morton J. Horowitz, The Transformation of American Law 1870-1960, 51-52 (1992). This doctrine posited that through proper analysis, judges could scientifically determine which act in a series of events actually caused the plaintiff's injury. Id. at 52. Proximate cause was one of the basic expressions of this doctrine, along with the notion of a distinction between `proximate' cause and `remote' cause. Id. Implicit was the belief that one cause would prove to be the scientific proximate cause, and the single responsible defendant would be identified and held legally accountable. By the turn of the century, the doctrine of objective causation was subject to serious criticism. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and Leon Green, along with other members of the Legal Realist movement, argued that because judges and jurists inevitably imported moral ideas into their determinations of legal causation, they were making discretionary policy determinations under the guise of doing science. Id. at 53; see also Leon Green, Rationale of Proximate Cause 12 (1927) (noting that causal analysis was the point at which the law-making function of the courts is most frequently employed). By the 1930s, the Realists' influence was felt in American law by the innovation of a new distinction between actual or `but for' causation, on the one hand, and legal or proximate causation, on the other. Horowitz, supra, at 63. Judge Andrews' dissenting opinion in Palsgraf v. Long Island R.R. Co., 248 N.Y. 339, 162 N.E. 99 (1928), quoted by the Court today, is a classic statement of the Realists' bifurcated view of causation. Examining actual or but for causation, Judge Andrews likened the inquiry to observing the ripples in a pond after a stone is thrown into it. Andrews reasoned that the explosion at one end of the platform was clearly the but for cause of the injury to Mrs. Palsgraf at the other. But turning to the proximate cause analysis, he explained: What we ... mean by the word proximate is that, because of convenience, of public policy, of a rough sense of justice, the law arbitrarily declines to trace a series of events beyond a certain point. This is not logic. It is practical politics.... . . . . ... There is in truth little to guide us other than common sense. Id. 162 N.E. at 103-04. For the Realists, then, cause-in-fact was a purely factual inquiry, while proximate cause was a policy determination that legal responsibility for damages should not be limitless. Despite broad support for this approach during the first half of the twentieth century, the terminology used by Green and other Realists was not embraced by the American Law Institute in its first Restatement of Torts. Instead, the Restatement adopted a more general approach to causation under the banner of legal cause: In order that a particular act or omission may be the legal cause of an invasion of another's interest, the act or omission must be a substantial factor in bringing about the harm and there must be no principle or rule of law which restricts the actor's liability because of the manner in which the act or omission operates to bring about such invasion. Restatement of Torts § 9 cmt. b (1934) (emphasis added). Under this definition, the substantial factor requirement served a similar role to cause-in-fact, but it was not the purely factual inquiry that the Realists had proposed. But cf. William L. Prosser, Handbook of the Law of Torts § 47, at 256 (2d ed.1955) (noting that the 1948 revision of the Restatement of Torts limited the application of substantial factor analysis to the cause-in-fact inquiry and that substantial factor tests therefore cannot include the policy considerations inherent in the Realists' proximate cause analysis). This refusal to adopt a bifurcated view paved the way for continued debate on proper causal analysis, although the leading treatise writers of the period appeared to adopt the Realist view. See, e.g., Prosser, supra, § 44, at 218-19 (Causation is a fact. It is a matter of what has in fact occurred.). More recently, the Legal Realists' bifurcated approach has itself come under attack. The primary conflict arose from the Realists' attempt to separate the fact-based cause-in-fact analysis from the policy-driven proximate cause analysis. As one commentator has noted, some academics insisted that both inquiries simply camouflage ad hoc policy decisions on ultimate liability, while others insisted that the two inquiries are merely different steps in the ultimate attribution of responsibility based on commonsense `causal' principles. Richard W. Wright, Causation, Responsibility, Risk, Probability, Naked Statistics, and Proof: Pruning the Bramble Bush by Clarifying the Concepts, 73 Iowa L.Rev. 1001, 1009 (1988). This new generation of legal thinkers has generally sought to replace the bifurcated analysis with a flexible, single-step analysis that could be adapted to the relevant issues in any case. Two leading scholars thus described the concept of causation as a central concept of physical manipulation or intervention round which cluster a whole group of concepts, which can in a broad sense be termed causal, and which are related in different ways to the central case. H.L.A. Hart & Tony Honore, Causation in the Law xxxiii (2d ed.1985). But see Wex S. Malone, Ruminations on Cause-in-Fact, 9 Stan.L.Rev. 60 (1956) (arguing that while considerations of policy inevitably invade the cause-in-fact analysis, just as they do proximate cause, the distinction may nonetheless be valid). Even the later revisions of Prosser's famous treatise, albeit after Prosser's death, retreated from the bifurcated fact/policy analysis that Prosser had championed, and opined that the cause-in-fact determination was policy dependent, and proximate cause was, at least in part, fact-laden. See Wright, supra, at 1009. These debates continue today, and the precise content and structure of the causal analysis is, to say the least, unsettled. See generally Hart & Honore, supra, at xxxiii-lxxxi (discussing the academic debate between: (1) those who would maximize the causal inquiry by introducing policy and other issues into the equation; and (2) causal minimalists who limit causation to factual inquiries); Wright, supra, (comparing and contrasting causation theories of traditional scholars, libertarians, legal economists, realists, and critical legal studies scholars).