Sayfa 332. Causation in Context
8. The connection between ‘cause’ and ‘effect’ is essentially a question of fact.…
The inquiry “is to be understood as the man in the street ... would understand it”.…
9. The ‘common sense’ approach to causation is not a legal test. Common sense:…
defines the approach to evaluating the evidence, not a test to be applied to it.…
In Chappel v Hart, each of the five…
Each member, applying their own common sense, promptly split on the answer to the…
So maybe ‘common sense’ is not so common!…
10. How the inquiry into ‘What caused an effect?’ is conducted and resolved will…
a) someone’s guilt in criminal proceedings; or…
b) whether a plaintiff should succeed in a claim for damages for breach of contract…
Lord Hoffmann illustrated the relevance of the purpose of the inquiry when he said…
often arise for the purpose of attributing responsibility to someone, for example, so as to blame him for something which has happened or to make him guilty of an offence or liable in damages. In such cases, the answer will depend upon the rule by which responsibility is being attributed. Take, for example, the case of the man who forgets to take the radio out of his car and during the night someone breaks the quarterlight, enters the car and steals it. What caused the damage? If the thief is on trial, so that the question is whether he is criminally responsible, then obviously the answer is that he caused the damage. It is no answer for him to say that it was caused by the owner carelessly leaving the radio inside. On the other hand, the owner’s wife, irritated at the third such occurrence in a year, might well say that it was his fault. In the context of an inquiry into the owner’s blameworthiness under a non-legal, common sense duty to take reasonable care of one’s own possessions, one would say that his carelessness caused the loss of the radio.…
11. In insurance law, the causation inquiry arises in a contractual or statutory…
By way of contrast, causation in the law of negligence involves a normative judgment.…
in the context of the attribution of fault or responsibility: whether an identified negligent act or omission of the defendant was so connected with the plaintiff’s loss or injury that, as a matter of common sense and experience, it should be regarded as a cause of it.…
12. In Standard Oil Co v United States, Frankfurter…
Unlike obligations flowing from duties imposed upon people willy-nilly, an insurance policy is a voluntary undertaking by which obligations are voluntarily assumed.…
Therefore the subtleties and sophistries of tort liability for negligence are not to be applied in construing the covenants of [an…
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