CAU - The Law Mind Legal Dictionary

CAUAuthored

The Law Mind • 761 words

Definition

CAU is an abbreviation appearing in historical legal texts and manuscripts for causa, the Latin term meaning "cause" — in its legal sense, a matter, case, reason, or ground of action. In older English legal writing and in common law pleading, causa was used both in the narrow sense of a legal case or suit and in the broader philosophical sense of a causal relationship between acts and consequences.

As an abbreviation, CAU (or cau.) signals the reader to the Latin causa and its derivatives, including causa causæ, causa causati, and related maxims that bear directly on questions of legal causation and proximate cause doctrine.

Common Confusion

CAU as an abbreviation should not be confused with its modern initialism use (credit card account updater, a fintech term). In historical legal manuscripts and digests, CAU is purely a contracted form of causa and carries no financial meaning. Researchers encountering CAU in a nineteenth-century legal dictionary, pleading treatise, or case digest should read it as causa throughout.

Why It Matters in Research

Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus will encounter CAU almost exclusively as an abbreviation in older printed digests, law dictionaries, and treatise indexes — particularly those organized alphabetically, where Latin causa entries were often shortened in running text or margin notations. Burrill's Law Dictionary is a representative example: the abbreviation appears in the body of entries dealing with causation doctrine, proximate cause, and the maxim causa causæ est causa causati.

The critical research trap is misreading CAU as a standalone term rather than a contraction. In Burrill's era, abbreviated Latin was standard practice in legal publishing to conserve space, and readers were expected to expand contractions fluently. A researcher unfamiliar with this convention may fail to locate the full entry under CAUSA or under PROXIMATE CAUSE when following a cross-reference abbreviated as cau. or CAU.

The passage preserved in the source material is substantively important for proximate cause research: it records the tension between the philosophical rule (causa causæ est causa causati — the cause of a cause is the cause of the effect) and the common law rule that courts look to the immediate, not the remote, cause. The Bacon Maxims reference (Bac. Max. Reg. 1) and the Freeman report citation (Freem. 329) are the anchor authorities. Researchers tracing the intellectual genealogy of proximate cause doctrine — from Bacon's Maxims through nineteenth-century common law to modern tort law — should treat this abbreviated entry as a pointer to that longer doctrinal lineage, not as a self-contained definition.

Jurisdictional variation is not meaningfully implicated by the abbreviation itself, but the underlying causa doctrine it encodes was received differently in equity and at common law, and later diverged between American jurisdictions on the question of how remote a cause must be before liability is cut off.

Historical Dictionary Support

Burrill's Law Dictionary does not define CAU as an independent term. It uses CAU as a running abbreviation within entries devoted to causa and causation, preserving key maxims and their judicial glosses. The fragment in the source material captures the core common law position: "It were infinite for the law to judge the causes of causes, and their impulsions one of another; therefore it contenteth itself with the immediate cause, and judgeth of acts" by their proximate, not remote, antecedents.

This formulation is consistent with Bacon's first Maxim (In iure non remota causa sed proxima spectatur), which Burrill cites directly. Historical dictionaries of the same period — including Tomlin's and Bouvier's — address causa at length under that full spelling but do not use CAU as a separate headword. Burrill's use of the abbreviation reflects editorial compression rather than a distinct legal concept; the substance is always the fuller causa doctrine.

No historical dictionary treats CAU as a term of art in its own right. Its significance is indexical: it points researchers toward entries and maxims that shaped Anglo-American causation doctrine from Bacon forward.

Jurisdictional Note

The underlying causa maxim (immediate cause governs; remote causes are disregarded) was received into both English and American common law and remains influential in tort and contract causation analysis, though modern courts apply proximate cause and superseding cause doctrines rather than citing Bacon's Maxims by name.

Encyclopedia Cross-Reference

See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Causation; Proximate Cause; Latin Maxims in Common Law.

CAUmain

Burrill's Law Dictionary • 1867

(258) (259) law, not the remote but the immediate cause is considered. Bac. Max. Reg. 1. “Though, in philosophy, they say causa causæ est causa causati [see supra,] yet in law, the immediate cause is respected." Freem. 329. "It were infinite for the law to judge the causes of causes, and their impulsions one of another; therefore it contenteth itself with the immediate cause, and judgeth of acts by that, without looking to any further degree." Bac. Max. ub. sup. Lord Bacon has illustrated this maxim by examples of covenants, leases, feoffments and other conveyances. In modern practice, however, it is chiefly applied to the law of marine insurance, in which it is an established rule that the loss must be a direct or immediate, and not a remote consequence of the peril insured against. Park on Ins. (8th ed.) 131. Broom's Max. 104, [166.] 1 Kernan's R. 9, 15. Thus, if a ship be driven ashore by the wind, and in that situation be captured by an enemy, the loss is to be imputed to the capture, and not to the stranding. 3 Kent's Com. 302, and note. In this instance, the stranding is the causa remota, or causans; the capture the causa proxima, or causata. But see 2 Bing. 205. 1 Story's R. 157. Curtis, J. 14 Howard's R. 366. The same maxim is applied in the law of agency; an agent not being responsible for a loss occasioned by an act or omission on his part, where the loss is merely a remote consequence of such act or omission.* Story on Agency, § 217 c. Causa et origo est materia negotii. The cause and origin is the substance of the thing; the cause and origin of a thing are a material part of it. The law regards the original act. 1 Co. 99, Shelley's case. Things are construed according to their cause and beginning. Finch's Law, b. 1, ch. 3, p. 10. Wingate's Max. 41, max. 21. Id. 61. max. 25. This is substantially the same with the maxim of the civil law: Cujusque rei potissima pars principium est. The chiefest part of every thing is the beginning. Dig. 1. 2. 1. tionis; among other sources of acquisition, a great, distinguished and well known source or title is that of gift. Bract. fol. 11. Est etiam alia causa acquirendi rerum dominia, quæ dicitur causa successionis; there is also another source or mode of acquiring the ownership of things, which is called the source of succession, [title by succession]. Id. fol. 62 b. See Id. fol. 31 b, 40. ( 260 ) Capitul. lib. 5, tit. 208. L. Salic. tit. 46. Spelman.

CAUnoun

Wiktionary (English) • 2026

Wiktionary contributors • CC BY-SA 4.0 • via Kaikki
Extracted and formatted for display by Law Mind. Source link opens the current Wiktionary page and its contributor history; it is not a frozen copy of this extract.

Initialism of credit card account updater, a service to automatically update customers' credit card information.

Cauname

Wiktionary (English) • 2026

A surname from French.

CAUname

Wiktionary (English) • 2026

Initialism of Christian Albrecht University of Kiel.

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