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Sidebar - Two Separate Jobs
Statutes & Stethoscopes: Sidebar - Two Separate Jobs
Your causation opinion has two separate jobs, answered by two different phrases. When I taught "more likely than not," I was asking one phrase to do both, and it can't. In this bonus Sidebar I break the sentence apart so you never blend them again.
Job one is confidence: how sure are you? That is "to a reasonable degree of nursing certainty" (or medical certainty for physicians). Job two is the role the breach played: was it a substantial factor, or in Pennsylvania's jury instruction, a factual cause? Then "because" and the mechanism make a…
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