Causation: Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Legal Implications (Bar-Asher Siegal)
Additional Information
Satisfies Senior Writing RequirementNo
Class meets in person.
Course Continuity
Students are encouraged to stay home if you are ill or experience flu-like symptoms. If you miss a class for any reason, it is still your responsibility to make up the work missed.
I offer the following to students who miss class due to illness:
- I will make PowerPoint slides or other class materials routinely available on the course site to everyone in the class.
- Please make an appointment to meet with me and I will review/answer questions about what you missed.
Meeting Times/Location
R 4:30PM - 6:30PM
Tanenbaum Hall 253
Category
Seminar
Credits
2.0
Causation: Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Legal Implications
Elitzur Bar-Asher Siegal
This course explores fundamental questions about causation and their implications for the legal domain. Causation lies at the heart of both the sciences and everyday reasoning—especially in determining responsibility and blame. But what does it mean to say that one event caused another? What kinds of entities can stand in causal relations—people, actions, events? When multiple factors contribute to an outcome, what leads us to identify one as the cause? And to what extent do our linguistic practices—how we describe events and relationships—shape our causal judgments?
These questions are central not only to legal reasoning but also to disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, and linguistics. In this course, we engage with both analytical and empirical approaches to causation, examining how different fields tackle these issues and where their insights converge or diverge.
Throughout the course, we will reflect on the legal ramifications of various theories of causation—both in normative terms (e.g., what the law ought to recognize as a cause) and in practical terms (e.g., how best to construct legal arguments that establish causal links). The course aims to provide students with the conceptual tools and interdisciplinary perspective necessary for a nuanced understanding of causation in legal contexts.