The decisive factor for the allocation of legal responsibility (both as a general rule and in the specific case) and the determination of what specific events, according to law, should be considered as being events giving rise to legal liability, such as a tortious act, is thus a factor that ultimately is stipulatively and thus strictly speaking arbitrarily determined, but not a factor to be decided solely upon the basis of the purported natural causality existing between two events. One can thus argue that the determinative factor for the determination of legal causality is a political evaluation of the relationship reigning between a relatively arbitrarily chosen mass of requisites and an accompanying chosen mass of sanctions. According to legal causality (Swedish: juridisk kausalitet) in tort law (Swedish: skadeståndsrätt) culpability requires that the person causing the damage, the tortfeasor, must be the direct, real cause of the damage in question. However, this rule is of a peculiar nature, because the rule itself demands that a direct causal series of events emanating from the tortfeasor to the inflicted damage is demonstrated to be at hand for an act to be regarded as being tortious.The reason for this is that the cause for a specific instance of damage that incurs legal liability is indeterminable unless a rule of law prescribing which specific actions or omissions that in themselves shall be considered as damaging already exists.246 This is due to a wide range of circumstances. It is impossible to establish a sufficiently firm connection, if any, between the damage caused and the personality of the tortfeasor (which according to theory constitutes a necessary condition for legal culpability to arise). Furthermore, from a purely objective point of view, in the chain of causality, tort law itself is inevitably a ca l l f o r s c i e n t i f i c p u r i t y 455 5. 2 . 2 di st inct ion betwe en two conce pts of legal causal i ty - gene ral de scri pt ion and de f ini t ion 246 Hägerström, “Rättsidéers uppkomst (1917),” pp. 97-101.
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