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This Article provides empirical support for the heavily debated role of foreseeability in tort law. In Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad Co., then-Chief Judge Benjamin Cardozo argued that foreseeability is a necessary requirement to establish duty, while Judge William S. Andrews dissented on the grounds that duty describes the general relationship that exists in society and that foreseeability should be a consideration for proximate cause. Most consider this debate meaningful as dictating that when foreseeability is considered--in duty versus in proximate cause--will determine who considers it--judge versus jury. While conventional thinking suggests that a Cardozo view of duty implies that judges will be the arbiter of foreseeability, many states have departed from this thinking and assigned juries as the arbiter of foreseeability independent of the duty versus proximate cause debate. This Article tests the effect of foreseeability consideration by using legal precedent variation in foreseeability by state. Borrowing from the tort reform literature, it considers three potential outcomes that have been shown to matter to changes in tort law: accidental deaths, infant mortality rates, and torts case starts. To properly identify the effect of changes to foreseeability consideration on these outcomes, I employ the common empirical strategies of two-way fixed effects regressions and Mundlak regressions, which represent a new advancement in the empirical literature. I find little evidence that when foreseeability is considered--in duty versus in proximate cause--matters, but who considers it does. States in which judges are the arbiter of foreseeability experience an increase in accidental deaths and an increase in the infant mortality rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on opioid addiction as public nuisance. Topics discussed are common law origins of public nuisance in England, the United States and California, history of opioid epidemic and litigation, opioid epidemic in San Francisco, California, opioid addiction in interference with public rights, public space and public morals such as in the case of homelessness and methamphetamine use, proximate cause objection and role of public policy in addressing public nuisance counterarguments.

The article focuses on the causation question in Missouri's felony murder law, which determines whether a death can be considered the "result of" a felony. It examines two Missouri cases, including State v.Harding and State v. Balbirnie that raise questions on what constitutes "causation" and "proximate cause," offering perspectives on how courts should analyze the issue. It also discusses how Missouri differs from other states in its approach to the proximate cause question.

The article discusses the background of civil the U.S. Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act claims and the requirements of statutory standing under section 1964(c), and mentions the court case Holmes v. Securities Investor Protection Corp. on third-party payors and proximate cause.

This paper examines the different regimes of insurer liability under concurrent causation in English law and Chinese law. The analysis shows that neither English law nor Chinese law is satisfactory in terms of the insurer's liability in such cases. It is argued that only one proximate cause should be identified among multiple causes except in the circumstance where an excluded risk and an insured risk concurrently and independently cause a loss of the subject matter insured. Under this exception, the liability in apportionment approach might be an appropriate solution to the question of the insurer's liability under concurrent causation. This approach, however, is not suggested for concurrent causation where an uninsured risk is one of the proximate causes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses three court cases in Missouri Supreme Court, including the Green Street Investors, LLC v. The St. Louis Woodworks, Inc.,Harned v. Spurlock, and Harris v. City of St. Louis.The first case confirms that in unlawful detainer actions, only the right to immediate possession is at issue; the second case rules that juror misconduct must be shown to both parties for a new trial; and the third case concludes that police pursuit was not the proximate cause of a fatal collision.

The article focuses on the examination of the proximate cause standard under the Fair Housing Act (FHA) through the City of Oakland v. Wells Fargo Co. case, in which Oakland accuses Wells Fargo of engaging in discriminatory practices leading to foreclosures and reduced property values. The article discusses the history of the FHA, the 2008 housing market crash and subsequent recession, and the arguments presented in the case regarding proximate cause and damages.

The article discusses legal issues like proximate cause, the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, and the students' right of speech by analyzing the 1969 case Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District and the U.S. Supreme Court ruling. Also cited are the court's reiteration on the public school students' constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression and the substantial disruption standard, and the case of student Brandi Levy.

The central question in the law of proximate cause is how to divide risks into parts. The leading test of proximate cause, the foreseeability test, requires the jury to decide whether the "general type" of outcome that occurred was too improbable to be foreseeable. Before the jury can address this question, though, it has to aggregate the possible outcomes of the defendant's conduct into "general types." In effect, then, the foreseeability test requires the jury to divide the risk into parts. So does a promising alternative to the foreseeability test, Judge Posner's increased-risk test. Nobody has developed a workable, determinate method of dividing risk into parts, however. Instead, adherents of both tests have settled for telling juries vaguely to aggregate possible outcomes according to the "sort of mishap" that occurred. As a consequence, both tests are fundamentally indeterminate. This Article argues that this aggregation difficulty is solvable, though only within the framework of Judge Posner's increased-risk test. The solution lies in dividing up risks as Darwin divided up life forms--according to "community of descent." Specifically, outcomes may be situated in relation to one another (1) on the basis of their "descent" from a particular mediating event; and (2) on the basis of their non-descent from a particular extrinsic condition. This method of dividing up the risks isn't just determinate. When it's used to frame the increased-risk question--that is, when it's used to define the aggregate of possible outcomes that must be characterized by increased risk--this method of dividing risk produces intuitively satisfying answers to a wide range of proximate cause questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theories of legal causation that identify the concept with probability‐raising generate false positives where the defendant's conduct raises the probability of harm but brings about that harm in the wrong kind of way. Moreover, what the law seeks to deter is not conduct that raises the probability of harm, but rather conduct that is dangerous. A legal or proximate cause is one that harms the plaintiff through the causal mechanism that sustains the lawful generalization that the defendant's conduct was dangerous. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The many facets of tort liability are filtered through the requirement of proximate cause, which has made the element confusing and the source of considerable controversy. Is proximate cause properly determined by the directness test or the foreseeability test, each of which has been both widely adopted and roundly criticized? Is there any defensible conception of a direct cause? Is foreseeability an adequately determinate method for limiting liability? If so, is foreseeability relevant to duty, to proximate cause, or to both elements? Disagreement about all these matters stems from the failure to fully untangle the role of proximate cause across all elements of the tort claim. In a negligence case, for example, duty determines the risks that factor into the duty to exercise reasonable care. This property implies that the duty must be limited to the risks of foreseeable harm in order for the standard of reasonable care to govern only those harms. Foreseeability for this purpose is defined by the general zones of danger or reference classes that the reasonable person would consider when estimating the likelihood of accidental harm, reducing foreseeability to a behavioral concept that is adequately determinate for resolving the issue of breach. The element of proximate cause then provides a case-specific requirement that the plaintiff's injury must be within a general category of foreseeable harms encompassed by both the tort duty and its breach-a necessary predicate for liability. The prima facie case accordingly requires the foreseeability test to establish proximate cause for the breach of a duty that is limited to the risks of foreseeable harm. Once liability has been established, the damages phase of the case requires a further inquiry to fix the full extent of compensable harm proximately caused by the tortious conduct. The foreseeability test produces inequities in the determination of damages that the directness test fairly resolves. This inquiry is structured by the uniformly adopted rule that permits full recovery for an unforeseeably large harm, such as a crushed skull, that was directly caused by a tortious force that would normally cause minor injury, such as a bump on the head. This rationale also explains why the intentional torts exclusively rely on the directness test, eliminating culpability as a confounding factor in the analysis of proximate cause. Instead of being competing formulations, the directness and foreseeability tests each address diferent components of a tort claim, explaining why each one is both widely adopted and yet roundly criticized when employed as the only method for determining proximate cause. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for Ninth Circuit in the case City of Oakland v. Wells Fargo & Co. on Fair Housing Act (FHA) to end discrimination in lending. It mentions predatory lending and court held that Oakland must be given a chance to prove that its harm was within the zone of interest affected by Wells Fargo's actions. It also mentions matter of proximate cause and declining tax bases as a specific injury traced to discrimination in housing.

The article focuses on the decision of the U.S. District Court in the case In re Insulin Pricing Litigation on federal claims under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). It mentions court ruled that patients who need insulin cannot seek damages from the insulin manufacturers for price inflation and insulin pricing structure and the parties involved. It also mentions antitrust and RICO standing doctrines based on proximate cause sufficiently address the policy concerns.

The article discusses the insurance industry's present practices in treatment of cyber risks to the shipping industry. Topics covered include the cyber security issues facing the shipping industry, the difficulty in ascertaining the precise limits of insurance cover when it comes to dealing with cyber risks, and the doctrine of proximate cause in English Law.

Fear of crime has been associated with mental illness, poor physical health, reduced social cohesion and informal social control. Prior studies examining variance in levels of fear have been explained at both the individual and neighborhood levels. Although there is a growing body of research examining the association between specific land uses and perceptions of risk, these studies have generally measured land uses individually rather than in a grouped theoretical context or in terms of homogeneous categories; the latter are hampered by inadequate theoretical application and a failure to recognize differences in the effects of land uses that share common characteristics. Using hierarchical linear modeling, the current study examined whether the proximity and volume of theoretically driven criminogenic land uses influence perceptions of crime risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in the case WesternGeco v. ION Geophysical Corp. to uphold lost profit damages predicated on foreign, non-infringing actions following patent liability. It mentions Supreme Court's use of RJR Nabisco framework in rebutting the presumption against extraterritoriality opens foreign lost profit liability across patent infringement. It also mentions comity concerns into a policy-driven proximate cause analysis for future infringement cases.

This paper examines the relationship between product innovation and the success of price collusion using novel laboratory experiments. Average market prices in low innovation (LO) experiments are significantly higher than those in high innovation, but otherwise identical experiments. This price difference is attributed to LO experimental subjects' greater common market experience. The data illustrate how collusion can be perceived as the "only way to make it" in LO markets where product innovation is not a viable strategy for increasing profits. They suggest that product homogeneity can be a proximate cause, and product innovation an ultimate cause, of collusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The U.S. Supreme Court's WesternGeco LLC v. ION Geophysical Corp. decision provides the opportunity to broaden the role of proximate cause in patent litigation. As the country's highest Court has pushed patent law in the same direction as other civil causes of action, the full adoption of proximate cause as a prerequisite to all forms of monetary recovery appears inevitable. Proximate cause, as a multidimensional, policy-based requirement will allow the patent system to resolve several existing problems. As some examples, these include determining the appropriate extraterritorial reach of the system, accounting for the social benefits of infringing implementations, addressing the multiple serial plaintiff problem, and the problem of patent infringement actions brought against end-user consumers. As with other statutory causes of action that include proximate cause, the standard must be modified to account for the unique policy problems of the patent system. This Article offers a comprehensive approach to these issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past half century, courts in the United States have developed canons of construction that they use exclusively to construe forum selection clauses. These canons play an important role in determining the meaning of these clauses and, by extension, whether litigation arising out of a particular contract must proceed in a given place. To date, however, these canons have attracted surprisingly little attention in the academic literature. This Article aspires to fill that gap. It provides thefirst comprehensive taxonomy of the canons that U.S. courts use to construe forum selection clauses. These interpretive rules fall into four groups: (i) the canons relating to exclusivity, (2) the. canons relating to scope, (3) the canons relating to non-signatories, and (4) the canons relating to federal court. When a judge is presented with ambiguous language in a forum selection clause, she willfrequently turn to one of these interpretive rules of thumb to resolve the ambiguity. In principle, each of these canons produces outcomes that are broadly consistent with the preferences of most contracting parties. In practice, this is not always the case. Drawing upon interviews and e-mail exchanges with 86 attorneys, the Article shows that several of these canons produce outcomes that are arguably inconsistent with rnajoritarian preferences. In such cases, the Article argues that these canons should be cast aside. In their place, the courts should adopt new interpretive default rules that more closely track the preferences of most contracting parties. The Article's final contribution to the literature relates to contract drafting. If a forum selection clause is unambiguous, there will be no need for the courts to invoke the canons. The Article concludes by urging contracting parties incorporate certain words and phrases into their contracts ex ante so as to avoid incurring the costs associated with litigating their meaning ex post. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because legal determinations often turn on motive, and motives are often complex, courts must decide what to do about mixed motives. For example, a boss might fire someone both for lawful reasons relating to job performance and also because of illegal prejudice. Increasingly, courts evaluate such cases under a "But-For standard," which finds for the plaintiff only if the defendant would have acted differently but for the bad motive. Put another way, the defendant loses unless the bad motive made some kind of causal difference in outcomes. While this approach is intuitive, I argue that the But-For standard is problematic. The widespread acceptance of the But-For standard is the most important failure in our jurisprudence of mixed motives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the U.S. Supreme Court case County of Los Angeles v. Mendez, in which police officers entered into a shed occupied by Angel Mendez and Jennifer Garcia without a search warrant, in violating the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Topics discussed include the Fourth Amendment ensuring an individual's right to privacy, the Provocation Rule holding the police officer liable for any injury caused by use of force, and the Supreme Court's proximate cause analysis.

The Supreme Court's recent opinion in Bank of America Corp. v. City of Miami has created fresh uncertainty around the interpretation of the Fair Housing Act. The Supreme Court held for the first time that there is a proximate cause requirement under the Fair Housing Act but expressly declined to decide the standard for meeting that requirement. This Article responds to that open question. It contextualizes Bank of America within the Court's growing body of statutory proximate cause doctrine and uses the case as a starting point for addressing the broader question of how to determine the meaning of proximate cause in all statutory claims. The Article argues that the Supreme Court and lower courts must adopt a uniform analytical framework for determining proximate cause in statutory claims. The Article demonstrates that the Supreme Court's failure to do so thus far has produced deep doctrinal incoherence, culminating in the Court's inability to articulate a standard for proximate cause under the Fair Housing Act in Bank of America. The Article proposes that courts should uniformly apply the "scope of liability" framework as set forth in the recent Restatement (Third) of Torts. It contends that the scope of liability framework properly anchors proximate cause in the statutory scheme, ensures doctrinal determinacy, and prevents improper judicial legislation. The Article then applies this framework to arrive at the proper standard for proximate cause under the Fair Housing Act. Through extensive legislative history analysis, the Article concludes that the standard for proximate cause under the Fair Housing Act is satisfied where the harm caused by unlawful discrimination results from direct effects on the housing market and falls within one of the three core areas of congressional concern underlying the Act's enactment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In April 2005, Lucio Gutiérrez was removed from office in the context of a fast‐growing economy. With no economic hardship to fuel social outrage, the failure of Gutiérrez illustrates how political and institutional factors can be the most important forces determining presidential survival. In this article, we qualitatively analyse the path toward confrontation between Gutiérrez and the congressional opposition which led to his political demise. We find that Ecuador's weak democratic tradition working through more proximate causes – radicalism, normative preference for democratic institutions and a negative institutional equilibrium – coupled with other institutional and political variables accelerated Lucio Gutiérrez's fall from power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in the case Owens v. BNP Paribas on the dismissal of lawsuit filed against an international bank by the victims and families affected by the 1998 American embassy bombings. It mentions complaint alleged that the bank was civilly liable for the victims' injuries under the Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA). It also mentions proximate causation requirement necessary to trigger liability under the ATA.

The article focuses on superseding causation which is an inappropriate defense in failure-to-diagnose cases when the failure to diagnose is followed by another act of medical negligence. It mentions doctrines arising out of proximate causation superseding and intervening causation, and the medical malpractice complications rule. It also mentions superseding cause as a defense against liability for failure to diagnose and permitting or rejecting the defense.

County of Los Angeles v. Mendez, the Supreme Court’s recent decision rejecting shooting victims’ excessive force claims, has been written off as yet another case in which police violence has no civil rights consequences. The Court found that the deputies who shot Jennifer Garcia and Angel Mendez fifteen times used reasonable force because Mendez was holding a BB gun. But the deputies barged in on Garcia and Mendez while they were napping on a futon in their home, and Mendez grabbed his BB gun to stand up and steady himself. The Court remanded the case with instructions to consider whether the defendants’ warrantless entry into the plaintiffs’ home, a constitutional violation not entitled to qualified immunity, was the proximate cause of the deputies’ deadly force. Justice Alito, writing for the Court, advised plaintiffs that “there is no need to dress up every Fourth Amendment claim as an excessive force claim.” The invitation to attempt recovery through an alternative legal theory could prove revolutionary for victims of police-involved shootings. So long as they can rely on common law tort principles to show that their injuries were proximately caused by an earlier constitutional violation, they might avoid excessive force precedent’s insurmountable hurdles, which, in recent cases like Plumhoff v. Rickard and Brosseau v. Haugen, have sanctioned nearly all forms of law enforcement deadly force. If plaintiffs can recover damages for shootings, then 42 U.S.C. § 1983 might once again serve some real deterrent purpose, forcing police officers to think before they shoot. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigation into the causes or drivers of land cover change in the context of sustainable development is one of the main concerns in land use change studies. However, little has been known about quantifying drivers (proximate causes and underlying forces) of land cover change in southwest Ethiopia. Thus, the study aimed to quantify the main drivers that contribute to explain land cover change in Guraferda, southwest Ethiopia. Data acquired from household survey and focus group discussion and modeling approach were integrated to quantify drivers of land cover changes. Results show that agricultural expansion was the foremost proximate cause of land cover change. Likewise, the dominant underlying driving forces are economic factors, representing 78% of all cases. Hence, the knowledge and understanding the drivers of land cover change as caused by a combination of diverse proximate and underlying forces play an essential role in the implementation of sound land use policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The economic crisis has decimated the public coffers, producing an increase in efforts to generate revenue. For this reason, eliminating the existence of capital beyond the supervision of the Tax Authority has been attempted through ever-expanding legislation. With regard to money laundering this expansion has also been imposed, criminalising not only conduct of a clear criminal vocation but also that which falls within social standards: the so-called neutral acts. We will analyse the possible subsumption of such actions in the money laundering offense by examining jurisprudence and case law, in order to establish the limits of the intervention of criminal law with respect to socially appropriate conduct. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past three decades, there has been considerable interest among both researchers and the criminal justice system to reform line-up procedures to ensure eyewitness identifications are as accurate as possible. Recently, the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) methodology has been adopted to analyse line-up procedures, but it has not been universally accepted in the field. This article examines the application of ROC methodology to line-up data and proposes an approach based on log-linear models as an alternative method to analyse line-up procedures. We find that log-linear models allow for non-binary classification schemes that are necessary for analysing line-up outcomes. Conditional independence relationships between variables can also be identified through a log-linear model. Log-linear models also provide a natural framework to account for multiple sources of uncertainty present in eyewitness identification data. While the ROC analysis provides valuable insight into the changes in outcomes across different decisionmaking thresholds, incorporating a log-linear analysis allows us to examine these outcomes in finer detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The mean is not necessarily the essential summary of a survey. Particularly in surveys related to taxation, many surveys are assessed at a certain number of standard deviations above or below themean. This article derives optimal sample sizes for such surveys, both with and without a finite sample correction. It also extends those results to stratified sampling, and to auditing the sample size choices of a taxation authority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many legal cases require decisions about causality, responsibility or blame, and these may be based on statistical data. However, causal inferences from such data are beset by subtle conceptual and practical difficulties, and in general it is, at best, possible to identify the 'probability of causation' as lying between certain empirically informed limits. These limits can be refined and improved if we can obtain additional information, from statistical or scientific data, relating to the internal workings of the causal processes. In this article we review and extend recent work in this area, where additional information may be available on covariate and/or mediating variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on misconceptions and uncertainty about the interplay between artificial intelligence and the superseding cause doctrine from tort analysis and artificial intelligence software developers from liability. It mentions liability under the shield of the superseding cause doctrine will now likely be subject to a normal proximate cause analysis and advances in machine learning coupled with other continuing developments in artificial intelligence.

The article discusses the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in the 2017 case Bank of America Corp. v. City of Miami which deals with America's Fair Housing Act (FHA), legal standing to file a lawsuit, and a proximate cause legal doctrine. According to the article, the U.S. Supreme Court determined that cities can be aggrieved persons under the FHA. Foreclosures in Miami, Florida are examined, along with an unjust enrichment claim and minority neighborhoods in Florida.