GULF OIL SPILL -- LEGAL LESSON

PROXIMATE CAUSE is a legal term we will all have to learn. I will try to explain.

(PLEASE NOTE that these terms are all VERY COMPLEX legal terms, defined by thousands of apealate court decisions.)

If you do an act that harms another person, place or thing, you have to pay monetary damages for the harm you caused.

First, you have to prove that someone was negligent. Negligent means they knew or should have known that their act might cause harm. They acted anyway and harm was caused.

Then you have to prove that the act was the PROXIMATE CAUSE of the harm done.

Think of the Mythbusters episode where they used a tree to shoot a 'man' into a 'castle'. (The man was a dummy, and the castle was plastic.) If the tree broke and hurt one of the crew, the Mythbusters experiment would be the proximate cause of the crew member's injury. But if a crew member cut his finger while eating lunch, the cut finger would not have been proximately caused by the experiment.

If you know a first year law student, ask him/her about the train station case that is a tort professor's favorite way to explain proximate cause. (Law school joke -- in law, a tort is NOT a small cake.)

IN THE GULF OIL spill, was a teenager's inability to get a summer job proximately caused by the oil spill?