Duty and Proximate Cause for Tort Law

Limits on Liability: Duty and Proximate Cause
-A defendant’s negligent act can be a cause in fact of infinite harmful consequences.
-Tort law devotes considerable attention to separating the many harms a defendant’s conduct causes into two categories:
1. Harms the defendant should be required to pay for and
2. Harms whose costs the victims should bear themselves.
-Even if the defendant has acted tortiously and was the cause-in-fact of a plaintiff’s harm, the defendant will not be liable if a court rules that the defendant did not owe a duty to the plaintiff or that the defendant’s act was not a proximate cause of the plaintiff’s harm.