Causal Models of Legal Cases

Recently, there has been an increased interest in employing model-based definitions of actual causation in legal inquiry. The formal precision of such approaches promises to be an improvement over more traditional approaches. Yet model-based approaches are viable only if suitable models of legal cases can be provided, and providing such models is sometimes difficult. I argue that causal-model-based definitions benefit legal inquiry in an indirect way. They make explicit the causal assumptions that need to be made plausible to defend a particular claim of actual causation. My argument concerns the analysis of legal cases involving a combination of double prevention and causal redundancy. I show that discussions among legal theorists about such cases sometimes suffer from ambiguous assumptions about the causal structure. My account illustrates that causal models can act as a heuristic tool for clarifying such assumptions, and that causal models provide a framework for more accurate analyses of legal cases involving complex causal structure.

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Causal Models of Legal Cases

Cited by 3 publications

References 12 publications

The Rule of Law and Compliance: Legal Quadrant and Conceptual Clustering

The Rule of Law and Compliance: Legal Quadrant and Conceptual Clustering

FAIR: A Causal Framework for Accurately Inferring Judgments Reversals

Broken brakes and dreaming drivers: the heuristic value of causal models in the law

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