<p><italic>Perspectives on Causation</italic> is an excellent volume of essays. It contains several important contributions to each of the three (partly overlapping) “perspectives” which comprise the book: the analysis of current English and Scottish causal doctrine principally in tort/delict (“the law”); the role of scientific evidence in establishing causation, again largely in the context of tort (“scientific evidence”); and the theoretical, general, understanding of causation (“legal theory”). In a short review, it is impossible to comment upon all eighteen essays; a succinct overview of each is in any event provided by Dr Goldberg's helpful introductory pages. Rather, I focus unjustly upon one or two of the essays from each of the book's three perspectives, with the aim of giving a flavour of the themes of each perspective.</p>
<p>The essays concerning each of the perspectives are mainly focused on causation in fact. One can ask three primary questions here: (i) what is it? (ii) what role should it play in the law? (iii) what proof rules should govern it? Lord Hoffmann's opening contribution to the first perspective touches upon each of these. His claim is that there is no one legal concept of causation. Rather, what counts as “cause” depends upon interpreting the particular legal rule in which causal language is embedded. Since interpretation depends (in part) upon ascertaining the purpose of a legal rule, and different legal rules may have different purposes, what “cause” means may vary from context to context. The corollary is that an insistence that a finding of legal causation must minimally take as its basis some bedrock of <italic>factual</italic> or <italic>natural</italic> causation (be it <italic>but-for</italic> causation or some other minimalist causal concept) is misguided: everything depends upon context; and the context may dictate an interpretation of causation where even <italic>but-for</italic> is not required. One doubt about this is that to express one's conclusions about the normative purposes of a body of law as a conclusion about the meaning of the word causation is often unhelpful. Suppose one (wrongly) believes that the primary aim of the law of tort is to deter wrongful conduct. It may be thought, in situations where defendants can recurrently and easily predict that it will be difficult for claimants to prove causation against them, that it is justifiable to allow claimants to succeed simply by proving that defendants materially increased the risk of harm (rather than by adducing proof on the balance of...</p>
