What Is Proximate Cause?

Originally published by highrank.

Throughout your personal injury case, you may come across the term “proximate cause.” Proximate cause is, in essence, the primary cause of an injury. In a personal injury lawsuit, the plaintiff bears the burden of proof to show that the defendant’s actions or inactions were the proximate cause of injury. Understanding proximate cause and how it may come into play during your case can help you know how to best pursue your claim.

Defining Proximate Cause

A proximate, or legal, cause is an act from which an injury is the direct or natural consequence. Without proximate cause, the injury would not have occurred. The proximate cause of an injury doesn’t have to be the first event that sets a sequence into motion that eventually causes the injury – nor is the proximate cause always the thing that occurred closest in time or space to the injury. To be the proximate cause, an element only has to produce a foreseeable negative consequence.

To determine proximate cause, the court uses the “but for” rule, which asks whether the plaintiff would have been injured but for the defendant’s negligence. If the answer is no, the injury would not have occurred, the court can assign proximate cause. Proximate cause alone, however, is not enough to determine liability since a number of other factors could have also contributed to the accident. In most jurisdictions, the courts look at how substantial a defendant’s conduct was in producing the injury, and use this knowledge to determine liability.

Occasionally, there is an intervening cause that comes in between the defendant’s initial act of negligence and the plaintiff’s injuries. For example, a defendant may have inadequately trained his or her employees to work with heavy machinery. Due to inadequate training, an employee accidentally ran over and injured another employee. While the defendant did not directly cause the plaintiff’s injuries, the defendant’s inadequate training regime was still the proximate cause since it was the main, foreseeable reason for the accident.

Proximate Cause and Personal Injury Cases

The question of proximate cause is an important one in all personal injury lawsuits, since not every cause of an injury is legally liable. For example, an icy roadway may be the cause of a harmful car accident, but the accident victim cannot take the ice to court. Proximate cause is a way for the court to determine if it can hold the defendant liable for damages. Proximate cause deals largely with foreseeability – did the defendant know or reasonably should have known that his/her actions would result in injury? If so, then proximate cause exists.

Identifying whether a type of harm should have been foreseeable is possible by looking at whether the harm that occurred was likely under the circumstances. For example, a reasonable person can foresee that texting and driving can cause a harmful car accident. In the famous Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad case of 1928, on the other hand, the courts held that there was no proximate cause.

In this case, two railroad workers helped pull a man onto a moving train. By doing so, the workers made the man drop a package of fireworks, which exploded and scared the crowd of people on the train platform. A woman injured because of the scare tried to sue the workers. Since the workers could not have reasonably foreseen that helping the man would cause Mrs. Palsgraf harm, however, the court dismissed her case for lack of proximate cause.

Proximate cause is one of the most important elements in proving a personal injury case. Without proof of proximate cause, a judge and jury cannot hold the defendant liable for injuries. Protect your rights by always trusting an experienced attorney to help you with your personal injury case in Houston.

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