Causation in the Law

By G. Williams. 1961

Hart and Honoré's book is a thorough and scholarly study of the concept of causation in Anglo-American law. Closely reasoned, with full reference to the literature and a considerable treatment of Continental theories, it represents a serious attempt to restate the law in tort, contract and crime in an intelligible way. In future, any serious student of the subject will have to take note of it. Unfortunately for the authors they have backed a loser in supporting Re Polemis and criticising the foreseeability test; and since much of their argument depends upon their opinion on this question, their book must now be accounted largely out of date, if the decision of the Judicial Committee in The Wagon Mound receives the acceptance that seems probable. In respect of the general theory of causation, however, the discussion retains its intellectual interest; and the chapters on contract and crime, though relatively short, are largely unaffected by The Wagon Mound.

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Citations in the corpus

Explanation in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Social Sciences (2017, methodology): “Related to the idea of contrastive explanation, Hilton and Slugoski [77] propose the abnormal conditions model, based on observations from legal theorists Hart and Honoré [64].”
Judgments of cause and blame: the effects of intentionality and foreseeability. (2008, background): “…points to several psychological reasons for this: human actions seem more controllable than environmental events; they are easier to imagine rectifying (Kahneman & Miller, 1986), and they are often the abnormal feature that makes a difference to the ordinary course of affairs (Hart & Honoré, 1959).”
Causal-explanatory pluralism: How intentions, functions, and mechanisms influence causal ascriptions. (2010, background): “Spellman and Kincannon (2001) examined situations with multiple sufficient causes as well as situations involving multiple necessary causes to determine the role of counterfactual (‘‘but for”) causes in legal decision-making (see also Hart & Honoré, 1985).”
Causal superseding. (2015, background): “The causal superseding effect demonstrated across these four studies is both an exciting discovery and something that has been in legal records for over a century (Hart & Honoré, 1985).”
Toward a Unified Theory of Causality (2008, background): “A sufficient cause is trivial if it is almost never present and thus almost never generates the outcome of interest (see Braumoeller & Goertz, 2000; Goertz, 2006; Ragin, 2006; also see Hart & Honoré, 1959).”
Degrees of Causation (2009, methodology): “6This problem has been recognized for a long time in law and is the reason why many legal theorists argue that tort liability should be based on ‘fault’ or the ‘gravity of harm’ and not on the degree of causal contribution (Payne (1955), Hart and Honoré (1959)).”
Spreading the blame: The allocation of responsibility amongst multiple agents. (2010, unknown): “Attributing responsibility is a commonplace activity that has attracted widespread research in psychology (Alicke, 2000; Hilton, McClure, & Slugoski, 2005; Lagnado & Channon, 2008; Shaver, 1985), philosophy (Hart & Honoré, 1959/1985) and law (Moore, 2009).”
The Possibility Principle: Choosing Negative Cases in Comparative Research (2004, background): “For example, if a gas leak results in an explosion in the house of a smoker, one is inclined to think that the thousands of cigarettes that have been smoked are less important than the rare gas leak (see Honoré and Hart 1985 for an extensive analysis of this point).”
On the semantics and pragmatics of epistemic vocabulary (2015, background): “The famine example is due to Hart & Honoré 1985.”