Rule of construction identifying, in a chain of events, the decisive cause of the loss to decide whether an excluded or covered peril governs the indemnity.
Proximate cause refers to the event that directly produced the loss, as opposed to remote causes one could trace back indefinitely. The whole difficulty of insurance law lies in this arbitration, since going too far back in the chain lets one exclude almost everything, because every loss has a remote cause, and not going far enough lets one cover almost everything, because every loss has an immediate one. When an excluded peril triggers a covered one, the position of that cursor alone decides the fate of the parties, and drafting imprecision becomes a risk in itself. The operational lesson is that a clause leaving doubt over the sequence of causes will cost a lawsuit whose cost almost always exceeds the saving the imprecision was meant to buy.
In San Francisco in 1906, two per cent of buildings were destroyed by the excluded shock and ninety-eight per cent by the covered fire, so that the fate of dozens of companies turned on the cause adopted.
cause prochaine, cause immédiate, proximate cause