At the heart of any personal injury case is the issue of the defendant’s liability. All personal injury cases turn on whether the defendant is indeed liable for a plaintiff’s injuries and to what extent (as in cost) he can be held liable for the plaintiff’s injuries.
The legal concepts of intervening or superseding causes relieve a defendant of liability (or a portion of it). As we will explain further below, intervening or superseding causes can relieve a defendant of liability because they act to “break the chain” of causation.
Proximate Causation: What is it?
To be liable for a plaintiff’s injuries, it is axiomatic that the defendant’s actions must be the “proximate cause” of a plaintiff’s injuries. Proximate cause requires that the defendant’s actions be the “legal cause” of a plaintiff’s injuries as well as the “cause in fact.”
Essentially this means that the defendant’s actions (or omissions) must have been the direct cause of the plaintiff’s injuries, and it was foreseeable that someone would be injured as a result of the defendant’s actions (or omissions).
The legal concept of proximate causation is a thorny one that is not always easy to unravel. It combines, as one scholar puts it, the factual determination of who-did-it with policy considerations regarding who-should-pay. Resolving the tension between these two factors is not always easy to do.
Adding to the confusion is that proximate causation is a matter of court construction and judge-made law. In Florida, a defendant will be liable for all the “natural and probable consequences” of his act if his action was a “substantial factor” in creating the plaintiff’s harm and if that harm was foreseeable.
The legal concept (i.e., proximate causation) mandates that the defendant’s actions be the natural consequence of his actions/omissions, “unbroken” by any intervening cause, without which the plaintiff would not have been harmed.
While the case law sets out guiding principles of proximate cause, including “foreseeability” and “unforeseeabillty” tests, its application isn’t always consistent as the courts struggle to balance the “who-did-it” with the “who-should pay” concepts in any particular case.
Nevertheless, one aspect of proximate cause holds fast: that a defendant will escape liability if there is an intervening superseding cause of the plaintiff’s injuries.
Intervening Cause
Many accidents that lead to personal injury litigation —car accidents, commercial truck accidents, slips and falls, medical malpractice, products liability cases, etc. —involve negligent acts or omissions by more than one party or person. For example, commercial truck accidents can involve negligence on the part of a number of defendants. There could be negligence of the truck driver (e.g., speeding), as well as negligence on the part of the trucking company, maintenance company, or truck manufacturer.
Because a defendant cannot be held liable for a plaintiff’s injuries unless the plaintiff can prove causation, when more than one defendant is involved in causing the plaintiff’s harm, or when more than one event caused the plaintiff’s harm, the legal concepts of intervening and superseding causes arise.
Intervening or superseding causes are defenses a defendant can raise to be relieved of liability (in whole or in part) for a plaintiff’s injuries.
An intervening cause is an event or occurrence that comes between the defendant’s actions and the plaintiff’s harm— thereby breaking the causal link between the defendant’s actions and the plaintiff’s injuries.
This does not mean, however, that just because more than one cause of the plaintiff’s harm exists or because two or more actions worked in concert to cause the plaintiff’s injuries, that the defendant will be relieved of liability. To be relieved of liability, the intervening cause must be independent of the defendant’s actions. Thus, if the damage to the plaintiff was reasonably foreseeable even though the intervening cause was not foreseeable, or if the intervening cause was a foreseeable result of the defendant’s negligence, the defendant will still be liable for the plaintiff’s injuries.
Superseding Cause
As noted above, multiple actions can combine together to cause a plaintiff’s harm. Whereas an intervening cause is something that occurs between the defendant’s actions and the plaintiff’s harm and does not always relieve a defendant of liability, a superseding cause is an act by a third person that does relieve the defendant of liability.
A superseding cause is one that breaks the chain of causation between the defendant’s original negligence and the plaintiff’s injuries.
It “supersedes” (i.e., replaces) the defendant’s negligence because the defendant’s negligence is no longer the direct cause of the plaintiff’s injuries.
To constitute a superseding cause, the second action must be one that is independent from the defendant’s negligence and not foreseeable. Nor can it simply be the product of a chain of events that the defendant “set in motion.”
Pleading and proving personal injury cases requires extensive legal knowledge and skill. Our personal injury lawyers have the skill and experience you need.
Skilled Personal Injury Attorneys in Florida.
John Fagan and his legal team are dedicated to helping those who have been injured due to the negligence of another or are disabled. Contact us here or call our firm at 777-JOHN. We serve clients throughout Florida. Our main office is in Orange Park, but we have consulting offices in Palatka, Middleburg, Keystone, Starke, Gainesville, and Ocala.
