 Second, even when we restrict our focus to the law of some one legal tradition, within that tradition there will be discrete areas of law that make use of causation in their liability rules, such as the areas of contracts, torts, property, constitutional, and criminal law within the Anglo-American legal tradition. It is arguable that the precise contours (and maybe even the central notion) of causation differs between such areas; for example, it is plausible to think that there is a significant difference between contract law’s notion of consequential damages following upon breach and criminal law’s notion of the proximate causation needed to make out a completed crime (Moore 2009a: Appendix). Accordingly, to prescind from any such differences as may exist between areas of law, this entry focuses on what those within the Anglo-American legal tradition regard as the dominant usage of causation in the law, which usage is to assign responsibility to actors who cause harms to others. The areas of law where such assignment of cause-based responsibility predominates is in the law of crimes and the law of torts. The entry accordingly focuses on those two areas of law because they are central to the Anglo-American (and probably to any) legal system’s use of causation. They are also the areas of law in which (by far) the greatest attention has been paid to causation in both law and legal theory.