⚡ 10-Second Rule
You only pay for the kinds of harm your carelessness made predictable — not every weird thing that follows.
🧒 ELI-10 Scene
Zoe leaves her skateboard on the porch steps. Grandpa trips over it and sprains his ankle. That is exactly the danger her mess created. She's responsible. Now imagine a crow steals a skateboard wheel. It drops the wheel three streets away onto a cyclist. That freak chain was never the danger of messy steps. Not on Zoe. One more. Zoe bumps her classmate Theo in line. A bump that would barely nudge anyone else re-breaks Theo's healing arm. Zoe pays for the whole break. You take people exactly as fragile as you find them.
⚖️ Actual Rule
Proximate cause — the Restatement (Third) calls it scope of liability — limits recovery to harms that result from the risks that made the defendant's conduct negligent in the first place (paraphrasing Restatement (Third) of Torts: Liability for Physical and Emotional Harm § 29). The test is foreseeability of the general type of harm; the precise manner and extent need not be foreseeable (Restatement (Second) of Torts § 435). This scope question is where Judge Andrews's Palsgraf dissent located the foreseeability inquiry that Judge Cardozo assigned to duty.
An intervening force — one arising after the defendant's negligence — breaks the causal chain only if it is a superseding cause (paraphrasing Restatement (Second) of Torts §§ 440–442). Foreseeable intervening forces do not supersede: negligent medical treatment of the inflicted injury, injuries to or caused by rescuers, subsequent disease or accident flowing from a weakened condition, and ordinary negligence of third parties all keep the defendant liable. "Danger invites rescue." Wagner v. International Railway Co., 232 N.Y. 176 (1921) (Cardozo, J.). Unforeseeable, extraordinary forces — freak natural events, and typically third-party crimes or intentional torts — supersede and cut off liability. But a criminal or intentional intervening act does not supersede where the defendant's negligence consisted precisely of creating the opportunity or failing to guard against that misconduct (paraphrasing Restatement (Second) of Torts §§ 448–449).
The eggshell (thin-skull) plaintiff rule: the defendant takes the plaintiff as found and is liable for the full extent of harm aggravated by the plaintiff's unforeseeable physical frailty (paraphrasing Restatement (Second) of Torts § 461). Unforeseeable extent is never a defense once the type of harm is foreseeable.
ELI-10 translation: you answer for the dangers that made your act careless, for predictable follow-on messes like clumsy doctors and brave rescuers, and for the whole injury even when the victim was unusually breakable — but not for freak outside forces.
🔍 Ask These Questions
- Name the risks that made the conduct careless in the first place. (Why would Careful Carla scold this act — what could go wrong?)
- Is the plaintiff's harm one of those risks come true? (Did the danger on the scolding list actually happen?)
- Did another force jump in after the defendant's act? (Did a doctor, a rescuer, a stranger, or a storm join the story?)
- Was that force foreseeable — sloppy medical care, rescue attempts, ordinary carelessness? (Predictable follow-ups keep the first careless person on the hook.)
- Was it an extraordinary or criminal act? It usually cuts the chain — unless guarding against that very act was the defendant's job. (Leaving the vault open is careless because of thieves, so a thief is no escape hatch.)
- Is the harm just bigger than expected because of the victim's condition? Eggshell rule — pay in full. (You break the fragile classmate, you pay for the fragile classmate.)
⚠️ Bar Trap
Exam language: Examiners insert an intervening criminal act and offer "the third party's crime is a superseding cause relieving the defendant of liability." That answer is bait whenever the risk of that very crime is what made the defendant's conduct negligent — the unguarded entrance, the keys left in the ignition, the unlocked gun cabinet. The parallel trap denies recovery because the plaintiff's injuries were surprisingly severe, ignoring the eggshell rule.
ELI-10: A criminal in the story is not an automatic get-out card. If crime was the exact danger the defendant ignored, the chain holds. And "hurt worse than expected" is never a defense.
🧪 Question
A landlord owned an apartment building in a neighborhood that had experienced a series of break-ins and assaults over the prior year. For four months, tenants repeatedly reported that the lock on the building's rear entry door was broken, and the landlord did not repair it. One night an intruder entered through the unlocked rear door, forced his way into a tenant's apartment, and seriously injured her. The tenant sued the landlord for negligence. The landlord concedes duty and breach but argues that the intruder's deliberate criminal attack severed any causal connection to the broken lock.
Is the landlord's superseding-cause argument likely to succeed?
(A) Yes, because an intentional criminal act by a third party is always a superseding cause. (B) Yes, because the intruder, not the landlord, was the direct cause of the tenant's injuries. (C) No, because a landlord is strictly liable for injuries occurring in a building's common areas. (D) No, because the risk of criminal intrusion was the very hazard that made the landlord's failure to repair the lock negligent.
Answer: (D). A criminal intervening act supersedes only when unforeseeable. Here the string of neighborhood break-ins and repeated tenant complaints made intrusion through the broken door the precise foreseeable risk of non-repair, so the attack falls squarely within the scope of the landlord's negligence.
💡 Why the Wrong Answers Are Wrong
- (A) overstates the rule with "always"; foreseeable crime does not supersede, especially when preventing it defined the duty breached.
- (B) confuses directness with scope; the last actor in the chain does not automatically absorb all responsibility from the negligent enabler.
- (C) reaches the right result on a fake rule; landlords owe reasonable care in common areas, not strict liability, and inventing strict liability loses points on reasoning-based grading.
- ELI-10: The misconception is treating any criminal as a chain-cutter. When the criminal walking through the broken door was the predictable danger all along, the careless door-owner stays responsible.
