Abstract
AbstractGlanville Williams's influential 1989 article on causation, “Finis for Novus Actus?”, addressed two pertinent questions: (1) when, and on what grounds, may a person be judged to bear causal responsibility for harms most immediately brought about by the subsequent action of another person (the locus classicus of the novus actus interveniens doctrine), and (2) how should questions of causation be resolved in cases where the potential cause in question constitutes an omission? This article revisits these questions through an engagement with some of the major causation cases decided in the criminal courts in the past decade. The discussion of these cases is set in the broader context of a critique of H.L.A. Hart and Tony Honoré's influential doctrinal-theoretical framework for findings of legal causation, the autonomy doctrine, on which Williams had built his arguments.
Highlights
Glanville Williams’s influential 1989 article on causation, “Finis for Novus Actus?”, addressed two pertinent questions: (1) when, and on what grounds, may a person be judged to bear causal responsibility for harms most immediately brought about by the subsequent action of another person, and (2) how should questions of causation be resolved in cases where the potential cause in question constitutes an omission? This article revisits these questions through an engagement with some of the major causation cases decided in the criminal courts in the past decade
INTRODUCTION “Finis for Novus Actus?” by Glanville Williams is one of the best-known articles to have appeared in the Cambridge Law Journal.[1]
Addressing the theory underpinning causation in criminal law through the prism of the draft clause on causation in the Law Commission’s 1989 Draft Criminal Code, it has retained a place in the canon of criminal law teaching materials long after the Draft Code has been allowed to slip into oblivion
Summary
The novus actus interveniens doctrine, already invoked on two previous occasions,[16] was endorsed in ringing tones by the House of Lords in Kennedy (no 2), where Lord Bingham’s leading speech cited both Williams’s article, and Hart and Honoré’s book, as providing “classic statements” of the “fundamental and not controversial” principle that “informed adults of sound mind are [to be] treated as autonomous beings able to make their own decisions how they will act”, such that “D is not to be treated as causing V to act in a certain way if V makes a voluntary and informed. On Hart and Honoré’s formula, V’s choice to seek euthanasia might initially seem like a novus actus interveniens because the competency assessment and the waiting period between request and implementation make this choice seem both deliberate and informed, and if all that “free” means is that no one forced V to ask for euthanasia, his choice would be considered free.[36] Even more so, the Belgian doctors’ conduct in acceding to the request might appear to qualify.[37] Like the British customs officer in Latif[38] who carried the drugs into this jurisdiction, the Belgian doctors were not prompted by Wallace to euthanise V, or acted in any way she influenced. Let us turn to the question whether there is a more convincing way to determine when the subsequent conduct of another person “break[s] the moral connection that would otherwise have been perceived between the defendant’s acts and the forbidden consequence”, as Williams put it in his article.[43]
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