Causation in the Law¶
Hart, H. L. A., & Honoré, T. (1985). Causation in the Law. Oxford University Press.
Cited by¶
4 citations across 4 artifacts.
Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.
Primes¶
- Minimal Modification Principle
- The structural insight is robust: a legal judgment about causation, a causal experiment in statistics, a moral reasoning about responsibility, a policy analyst's what-if, and a physicist modeling alternative scenarios all employ the same preservation-and-minimal-change logic, as Hart and Honoré (1985) demonstrated in their analysis of common-sense causal reasoning across legal and ordinary contexts.
This sourceComprehensive analysis of how courts use common-sense counterfactual reasoning to attribute causal responsibility; demonstrates that the same minimal-modification logic underlies legal, moral, and ordinary causal judgment.
Supported in partVerified against the publisher's abstract
The work's own abstract supports only that courts employ common-sense notions of causation in legal responsibility; it says nothing about statistics, policy what-ifs, physics, or a shared minimal-modification logic.
“This text is an updated and extended second edition supporting the findings of its well-known predecessor which claimed that courts employ common-sense notions of causation in determining legal responsibility.”
- The structural insight is robust: a legal judgment about causation, a causal experiment in statistics, a moral reasoning about responsibility, a policy analyst's what-if, and a physicist modeling alternative scenarios all employ the same preservation-and-minimal-change logic, as Hart and Honoré (1985) demonstrated in their analysis of common-sense causal reasoning across legal and ordinary contexts.
- Overdetermination
- Responsibility Attribution
- Tort law's "but-for" causation is an explicit counterfactual test, and comparative-negligence regimes apportion damages by fault percentage across plaintiffs and defendants.
This sourceComprehensive analysis of how courts use common-sense counterfactual reasoning to attribute causal responsibility; demonstrates that the same minimal-modification logic underlies legal, moral, and ordinary causal judgment.
Supported in partVerified against the publisher's abstract
The abstract supports the general thesis that courts use common-sense notions of causation in legal responsibility; it states neither the but-for counterfactual test nor comparative-negligence apportionment.
“This text is an updated and extended second edition supporting the findings of its well-known predecessor which claimed that courts employ common-sense notions of causation in determining legal responsibility.”
- Tort law's "but-for" causation is an explicit counterfactual test, and comparative-negligence regimes apportion damages by fault percentage across plaintiffs and defendants.
Mechanisms¶
- Counterfactual Sensitivity Probe
- This is the classic over-determination trap of but-for reasoning: when two causes are each sufficient, removing either one changes nothing, tempting the false conclusion that neither mattered.
This sourceUses overdetermination by independently sufficient causes to show how a simple but-for test can wrongly exclude every contributing cause.
- This is the classic over-determination trap of but-for reasoning: when two causes are each sufficient, removing either one changes nothing, tempting the false conclusion that neither mattered.
Verification¶
Does it exist? Confirmed. This work's DOI resolves to a registered record, which fixes its identity. That is all it fixes.
Does it back the claim? Read against the text for 2 of 4 citations: 2 supported in part. Each verdict is shown under its citation below, with what in the work backs the sentence.
Support is checked per citation rather than per work — the same source can be cited soundly in one article and wrongly in another. Per-citation recording began recently, so a citation with no recorded check is a gap in the record rather than evidence it went unchecked.
See how references were verified.
Registry ID ref:16ac1f74fa76 · see in the full table