Liability Without Fault and Proximate Cause

Abstract

As a logical matter there seem to be two possible schemes of legal liability. The first one may be stated as follows: One may be liable for all consequences of all of his acts. While it has been sug- gested that this was the principle of the mediaeval law, it has been pointed out by Professor Winfield that such was never literally the case. Under this principle, as he has shown, everyone would be in jail except for these reasons: no one could legally put anyone else in jail, no one could legally keep anyone else in jail, and no one could legally build a jail in the first place.