Once you've shown a defendant owed a duty and breached it, you still have to prove the breach actually caused your client's loss. Causation is the bridge between the wrongdoing and the harm — and it's often the hardest part of a negligence claim to establish. As a solicitor, this is where you assess whether a claim has real prospects: did this breach make the difference, and how far down the chain of consequences does the defendant's responsibility run?
This lesson builds your understanding step by step:
- Factual Causation: The But-For Test — the starting point: would the harm have happened anyway, and who must prove what.
- Material Contribution and Material Increase in Risk — how the law copes when several causes combine or science can't pinpoint the trigger.
- Loss of a Chance — why personal injury is all-or-nothing but lost economic opportunities can be recovered proportionally.
- Legal Causation: Remoteness of Damage — limiting liability to harm of a reasonably foreseeable type.
- The Eggshell Skull Rule — taking the claimant as you find them, even when their vulnerability worsens the harm.
- Intervening Acts (Novus Actus Interveniens) — when a later event breaks the chain and shifts responsibility.
- Multiple Defendants and Contribution — dividing liability between tortfeasors and recovering overpayments.