Case Law Bonus Post: Yanka v. Edwards Industries

Outline:

• Causation has two parts:
• Cause in fact, or direct cause: requires proving either
• That the plaintiff would not have been harmed but for the defendant’s conduct
• Or that the defendant’s conduct was a substantial factor in bringing about the harm.
• Proximate cause: requires proving both
• That the particular harm suffered by the plaintiff was a foreseeable result of the defendant’s wrongful or unlawful conduct
• And was of a type that could reasonably have been anticipated.
• In analyzing proximate cause, the factfinder must:
• Identify the particular risks that made the defendant’s actions culpable
• And determine whether the injury suffered is among those risks.

Notes: Notice that we’ve moved on to the second section of the caselaw. The last one focused on clarifying our understanding of “recklessness” and “reckless disregard.” This one focuses on our understanding of the “direct and proximate cause” language used in the selections from the Midlands Civil code [1200(4)]. Even though 1200(4) is only one element of the list that goes into proving recklessness, it requires that the plaintiff prove two things: that the defendant’s conduct was a direct cause of the plaintiff’s harm, and that the defendant’s conduct was a proximate cause of the plaintiff’s harm. This case law defines direct and proximate cause, and gives us a start at understanding how we determine whether or not something was a proximate cause.
Let’s start by looking at the definition of direct cause. Direct cause means basically the same thing we think of when we normally talk about something causing another thing- you stomping on my toes would be the direct cause of my sore toes. This case law gives us two different ways to prove something is a direct cause. The first one is what’s sometimes called the “but-for” test. It asks a question- but for the defendant’s conduct, would the plaintiff have been harmed- and invites us to do a thought experiment, in which we imagine that the defendant had never done whatever the plaintiff claims is reckless. Would the plaintiff have still been harmed? If the answer to that question is “no,” then the conduct was a direct cause of the harm. The second method of determining direct cause is fairly simple to understand, but less straightforward to apply. The idea of a “substantial factor” is pretty intuitive: the conduct has to have played a major role in bringing about the harm for it to be a direct cause in this test. But the term “substantial” doesn’t lend itself well to precise definition. There’ll be room to argue about whether some action really was a substantial factor in causing harm.
Proximate cause looks like a strange concept at first, but the example given in the case law really does illustrate the point nicely. There’s a disconnect between the risk taken by the parent and the harm actually caused: the law doesn’t hold people liable for those sorts of harms. The “foreseeability” language in the case law is a simple way to understand why: it isn’t fair to punish people for results they had no way of anticipating. It’s that disconnect the case law guides us to look for when it says “the factfinder must first identify the particular risks that made the defendant’s actions culpable and then determine whether the injury suffered is among those risks.” Let’s break that down a bit. The defendant in this case presumably took actions that entailed certain risks: the risk that someone would be killed, for instance. The jury’s supposed to look at the defendant's actions and essentially figure out what those risks were. Then if the plaintiff’s injuries are on that list, the defendant’s actions are the proximate cause of those injuries.