Active bond

What does Active bond mean in American Law?

The definition of Active bond in the law of the United States, as defined by the lexicographer Arthur Leff in his legal dictionary is:

An active cause (see causation) is one that brings about an effect by an act rather than by a failure to act. It is possible that there is a place in the law for a distinction between active and passive cause, but the usage is fraught with analytical danger. For every failure to act is, as much as an act, causative of what comes thereafter, or, more briefly put, every failure to act is an act. Hence it ought not necessarily be concluded that an active cause is culpably responsible for a legally significant effect, or even more responsible than a non-act. The question is one not of kinetics but of legal duty. It may be as much a wrong to keep still in the face of impending results as to change one’s position to bring them about. It is true that once the question is looked at from the point of view of legal duty, there does appear to be a legal bias against creating legally enforceable affirmative duties to act. For example, it is still presently the law almost everywhere in the United States that one can, without liability, sit

on a dock and watch an easily savable baby drown, whereas one may be held guilty of negligence if one undertakes a rescue and then botches it. Moreover, it is only exceptionally one’s duty to volunteer information in a commercial transaction, however much one might be liable for any inaccuracy actually spoken. This tendency against making action a duty may be justified in various ways, e.g., that it is easier to be sure of a person’s requisite knowledge when he acts than when he doesn’t (did he see the drowning baby?), or that people have some right (or at least rightness) in any achieved position, and should not be forced to modify it. There may also be some deep old historical distinctions at work here, e.g., the problem of assigning malfeasance and nonfeasance to appropriate forms of action.

But the critical point is that whatever weight these reasons may have, they ought not necessarily be conclusive; there is no absolute bar against making a failure to act the responsible, culpable cause of an impermissible effect. For example, it does not necessarily follow (though courts, including the Supreme Court, seem sometimes to have so concluded) that a school board which watches a long-standing pupil-assignment policy inexorably produce increasing racial segregation has no liability because it did not actively cause the segregation, for it is a perfectly sensible use of language to say that its act of not acting is causing the segregation.