Definition
In law, remote describes a cause, damage, or relationship that is too attenuated from the act or event in question to be legally cognizable. The term operates primarily as the antithesis of proximate: where a proximate cause directly and immediately produces a result, a remote cause is mediate — it sets something else in motion that then brings about the harm. Courts and legislatures invoke the concept to limit legal liability to consequences that bear a sufficiently direct connection to the defendant's act.
The term carries meaning across several distinct contexts:
1. Remote cause. A cause that contributes to an outcome only indirectly, through the intervention of an independent cause. A remote cause is generally not actionable in negligence; the plaintiff must show a proximate, not merely a remote, causal link between the defendant's conduct and the plaintiff's injury.
2. Remote damages. Damages that are not the natural and legal consequence of the act complained of. Courts decline to award remote damages on grounds of foreseeability and practical limits on liability. The classic statement: damage is too remote to be actionable when it is not the natural and legal consequence of the act complained of.
3. Remote parties in property law. In the law of deeds and covenants, a remote grantee is a successor in title at some distance from the original contracting parties. Whether a covenant runs with the land to bind or benefit a remote grantee turns on privity, intent, and the touch-and-concern test. In deed covenant litigation, the remoteness of the claimant from the original grantor-grantee relationship is frequently dispositive.
4. Remote interests. In future interests and estates, a contingency or interest is sometimes described as remote when it is unlikely to vest within a permissible period — most importantly under the Rule Against Perpetuities, which voids interests that may not vest within a life in being plus twenty-one years.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To connect to a computer from a remote location; also, to remove from something or someone.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Removed to a distance; not near; far away; distant — said of time or place. Also: removed from agreement or relation; foreign or alien to.
The common meaning of remote (physically or temporally distant) informs but does not fully capture the legal meaning. In law, remoteness is not merely a matter of distance — it is a legal conclusion about the sufficiency of a causal or relational link. A harm can occur inches away and still be legally remote; a covenanting party can be several transactions removed and still have enforceable rights. Researchers should treat remote in legal sources as a term of art carrying doctrinal weight, not simply a descriptor of physical or temporal separation.
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Common Confusion
REMOTE vs. PROXIMATE. These terms are frequently treated as simple opposites, but the line between them is a legal judgment, not a physical measurement. A cause is proximate when it is the dominant, direct, legally sufficient cause of harm; it is remote when something else — a superseding cause, an independent intervening act, or the plaintiff's own conduct — breaks the causal chain. Determining which side of that line a cause falls on is often the central dispute in negligence litigation. Historical sources sometimes imply the distinction is self-evident; modern practice treats it as a fact-intensive legal question.
REMOTE CAUSE vs. INTERVENING CAUSE. A remote cause sets the stage; an intervening cause enters the chain after the defendant's act. An intervening cause that is foreseeable typically does not render the original cause remote. One that is unforeseeable — a superseding intervening cause — may. Researchers will find these concepts treated separately in some sources and collapsed in others.
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Why It Matters in Research
Remoteness doctrine is one of the oldest limiting principles in tort law, and its application has shifted substantially over time. Early common law formulations — reflected in Rapalje & Lawrence and the first edition of Black's — state the rule in conclusory terms: damage is too remote if not the natural and legal consequence of the act. This formulation is circular and offers little analytical framework. Modern doctrine, particularly after the rise of foreseeability analysis in negligence, has layered a more structured inquiry on top of the older language. Researchers reading nineteenth-century cases or treatises should not assume that remote means the same thing as it does in a twentieth-century torts opinion.
In property research, remoteness has a distinct doctrinal career. The enforceability of deed covenants by and against remote grantees — parties who were not signatories to the original instrument — has generated substantial litigation over privity of estate, horizontal and vertical privity, and the running of burdens versus benefits. The Law Mind Real Estate Transactions & Construction Encyclopedia entry on breach of deed covenants addresses this directly and should be consulted alongside any primary source work in this area.
For future interests research, remote appears in Rule Against Perpetuities analysis. Historical sources — including Bouvier and Anderson — tend to cross-reference without elaborating, making the entries thin guides to actual doctrine. Researchers should anchor period analysis in the primary treatises of the era (Gray's Rule Against Perpetuities for the common law period; state statutory reform materials for the twentieth century and later).
One research trap: in older digests and headnotes, remote cause and remote damage are not always distinguished. A case indexed under remote damages may turn on causation; a case indexed under remote cause may dispose of the issue on foreseeability of harm. Read the underlying opinions rather than relying on digest characterizations.
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Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries are largely in agreement on the core meaning but vary in depth. Black's 1st edition offers only the damages formulation. Black's 2nd edition is the most analytically useful of the shelf sources, explicitly framing remote as the antithesis of proximate and noting that remoteness implies mediateness — the intervention of something else. This framing anticipates the modern proximate cause inquiry more clearly than any of the other historical sources.
Rapalje & Lawrence provides a concrete illustrative example — the servant discharged due to a master's reliance on slanderous words — that is useful for understanding how nineteenth-century courts applied the concept in defamation-adjacent tort claims. The example shows that remoteness was not limited to physical causation chains; it extended to economic and relational harms where the connection to the wrongful act passed through the independent decisions of a third party.
Bouvier and Anderson are minimal, cross-referencing rather than defining. Bouvier's direction to see CAUSA PROXIMA is the most useful navigational instruction in the corpus for this term. Neither source addresses remoteness in the property or future interests contexts, which is a gap that limits their utility for deed covenant or perpetuities research.
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Jurisdictional Note
Remoteness of cause and damage is a common law concept applied in all U.S. jurisdictions, but the analytical framework varies. Some states employ a foreseeability-centered test for proximate cause that effectively subsumes remoteness analysis; others maintain a distinct directness or natural-and-probable-consequences inquiry closer to the historical formulation. In property law, the enforceability of covenants by remote grantees turns on state-specific rules about privity and the running of covenants, with significant variation between jurisdictions that have adopted Restatement (Third) of Property approaches and those that have not.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Breach of Deed Covenants — Damages, Statute of Limitations, and Remote Grantee Claims (Law Mind Real Estate Transactions & Construction Encyclopedia)
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