On behalf of Professor Stapleton:

 

 

With respect, there is factual causation to the result but it lies outside the appropriate “scope of liability for consequences” (as I have argued we should now all agree to call the truncation step which in the past has variously been described as remoteness, legal cause, proximate cause, substantial factor and god knows what else!).

I discuss the point in detail at ‘The Risk Architecture of the Third Restatement of Torts’ 44 Wake-Forest Law Review (2009) 1309 at 1326. In my lectures I call this the “avalanche principle” in honour of Lord Hoffmann: see South Australia Asset Management Corp v York Montague Ltd [1996] UKHL 10, per Lord Hoffmann at paras 19-22.

 

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Jason Neyers
Associate Professor of Law
Faculty of Law
University of Western Ontario
N6A 3K7
(519) 661-2111 x. 88435