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Article: Proximate Cause
- Article from:
- West's Encyclopedia of American Law
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PROXIMATE CAUSE
An act from which an injury results as a natural, direct, uninterrupted consequence and without which the injury would not have occurred.
Proximate cause is the primary cause of an injury. It is not necessarily the closest cause in time or space nor the first event that sets in motion a sequence of events leading to an injury. Proximate cause produces particular, foreseeable consequences without the intervention of any independent or unforeseeable cause. It is also known as legal cause.
To help determine the proximate cause of an injury in negligence or other tort cases, courts have devised the "but for" or "sine qua non" rule, which considers whether the injury ...