Scheduled Maintenance Notice: H2O will be undergoing maintenance on Weds, July 30. Some features may be temporarily unavailable during this period. Thank you for your understanding.

Main Content

Casebook Read Credits
Criminal Law
Section 5 . 1 . 1
29 minutes

But For and Proximate Cause

Sam Kamin,
Dana Lindenberg

In this section we examine the traditional test for causation -- that the defendant be both the but-for cause of the charged harm and that the harm proximately (or foreseeably) resulted from her conduct. As we shall se the latter question is really little more than a judgment that it is fair to hold this defendant responsible for causing this harm. The Model Penal Code approach simply makes this explicit.

This book, and all H2O books, are Creative Commons licensed for sharing and re-use with the exception of certain excerpts. Any excerpts from the Restatements of the Law, Principles of the Law, and the Model Penal Code are copyright by The American Law Institute. Excerpts are reproduced with permission, not as part of a Creative Commons license.