A legally close enough link between someone's conduct and an injury, such that the law will treat that conduct as a cause of the harm.

Put more plainly, not every event in the chain counts. If a driver runs a stop sign and causes a crash, that collision is a foreseeable result, so proximate cause is usually easy to show. But if the connection gets too remote, unexpected, or broken by a new event, liability may stop there. Courts often ask whether the injury was a natural and probable result of what happened, not a far-off ripple effect nobody could reasonably expect.

That matters in injury cases because proving negligence is not enough by itself. An injured person also has to show that the defendant's conduct actually led to the harm in a legally meaningful way. In a highway wreck, for example, speeding, poor maintenance, or an unsafe lane change may all be argued as causes. On truck-heavy stretches like I-30 between Little Rock and Texarkana, sorting out which act truly led to the injury can get complicated fast.

In Arkansas, proximate cause is part of the standard civil liability analysis, and it can affect how fault is divided under Arkansas's modified comparative fault rule, Ark. Code § 16-64-122. If a party's actions were not a proximate cause of the injury, that party may avoid paying damages even if their conduct looks careless at first glance.