Opinion ID: 1679366
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 7

Heading: Legal CauseIn General

Text: We have concluded that the law recognizes a duty by a physician in this kind of situation to potential parents to take reasonable care to avoid acts or omissions which he can reasonably foresee would be likely to lead to the birth of a child. According to the pleadings, which must be accepted as true for purposes of the exception and motion, the doctor violated his duty of care and thereby in fact caused damage to the parents. Consequently, we are concerned here with whether the doctor's negligence was a legal cause of the parents' damage and, if so, the kind and the extent of damage to be attributed to the physician. Because the civil code does not define legal causation any better than it defines fault or damage, our courts have had to fill in the content of this notion. In doing so, this court has relied heavily on the works of Professors Green and Malone in developing a duty risk approach that incorporates the consideration of policy factors involved in a legal cause analysis elsewhere. See, e.g., Robertson, Dialogues on Hill v. Lundin, 34 La.L.Rev. 1 (1973). While this single case could be decided adequately on duty alone, we feel that more is called for here because of the complexity of the issues and the newly emerging legal duties involved. Rather than merely deciding that the defendant's duty does or does not cover certain types of damage after reflecting on appropriate policy considerations, we will not only engage fully in that judicial process but we will also attempt to articulate auxiliary rules for determining the extent and nature of damages ascribable to the defendant that will be helpful to triers of fact in future cases. These rules should be considered as general principles that can and should be expanded or contracted according to the relevance of certain policy considerations in a particular case. Furthermore, in formulating and applying these auxiliary rules or principles it may be helpful to compare some of the legal cause concepts that have developed in both the civil and the common law.