Recommended Citation
Sanne H. Knudsen, The Long-Term Tort: In Search of a New Causation Framework for Natural Resources Damages, 108 Nw. U. L. Rev. 475 (2014), https://digitalcommons.law.uw.edu/faculty-articles/15
Article Title
The Long-Term Tort: In Search of a New Causation Framework for Natural Resources Damages
Publication Title
Northwestern University Law Review
Keywords
environmental disasters, toxic torts
Document Type
Article
Abstract
Recent scientific evidence is proving that toxic releases have long-term, unintended, and harmful consequences for the marine environment. Though a new paradigm is emerging in the scientific literature--one demonstrating that long-term impacts from oil spills are more significant than previously thought--legal scholars, regulators, and courts have yet to consider the law's ability to remedy long-term ecological harms.
While scholars have exhaustively debated causation questions related to latent injuries for toxic torts, they have overlooked the equally important and conceptually similar causation problems of long-term damages in the natural resource context. Likewise, only a few courts have considered the standards of proving causation for natural resource damages. They have not considered long-term injuries.
This Article provides a foundation for developing causation frameworks that respect the complexities of long-term ecological harms. Specifically, this Article uses scientific research to illustrate the causal difficulty of proving long-term ecological injuries. In doing so, it establishes the foreseeability of long-term injuries and the inadequacy of applying a traditional torts paradigm.
Ultimately, this Article looks to toxic tort law and risk-of-injury cases for possible approaches to the causation challenges raised by long-term ecological injuries-these are challenges that, like latent toxic tort injuries, raise issues of time delay, aggregate exposure, synergistic effects, and multiple possible sources of harm.