proximate cause
Definitions from Case Law · United States Supreme Court
Definitions from Case Law
From 320 U.S. 476 - Brady v. Southern Railway Co. · 1943Most cited · 1,641 citing opinions
in order to warrant a finding that negligence, or an act not amounting to wanton wrong, is the proximate cause of an injury it must appear that the injury was the natural and probable consequence of the negligence or wrongful act, and that it ought to have been foreseen in the light of the attending circumstances
How the Supreme Court has restated “proximate cause”
Each Supreme Court definition of “proximate cause,” sized by how often later courts cited it. “Change” is measured by wording overlap with earlier definitions — a rough signal, not a semantic judgment.
How often courts cite the cases defining “proximate cause”
Court decisions citing the 6 opinions that defined “proximate cause” — 2,561 in all, by decade. Counts are citations to the defining cases as a whole, not verified uses of the term. The dip in the most recent years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the latest years.
All 6 definitions, chronological · 1868–1943
- ORIGINAL
One of the most valuable of the criteria furnished us by these authorities, is to ascertain whether any new cause has intervened between the fact accomplished and the alleged cause. If a new force or power has intervened of itself sufficient to stand as the cause of the misfortune, the other must be considered as too remote.
when there is no order of succession in time, when there are two concurrent causes of a loss, the predominating efficient one must be regarded as the proximate, when the damage done by each cannot be distinguished. And certainly that cause which set the other in motion and gave to it its efficiency for harm at the time of the disaster must rank as predominant.
By proximate cause is meant efficient cause. In other words, if the gas had not been there, would his death have followed? And was gas being there necessary to his death?
The law, in its practical administration, in cases of this kind regards only proximate or immediate, and not remote, causes, and, in ascertaining which is proximate and which remote, refuses to indulge in metaphysical niceties. Where, in the sequence of events between the original default and the final mischief an entirely independent and unrelated cause intervenes, and is of itself sufficient to stand as the cause of the mischief, the second cause is ordinarily regarded as the proximate cause and the other as the remote cause.
the efficient cause and not a merely incidental cause which may be nearer in time to the result