Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad Co.

Case brief: template

Case name:	Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad Company
Court:	COURT OF APPEALS OF NEW YORK
Citation; Date:	248 N.Y. 339 (1928)

PROCEDURAL HISTORY
Trial court:		Appeal court (for appeal cases only):
Plaintiff:	Palsgraf	Appellant:	Long Is
Defendant:	Long Is	Respondent:	Palsgraf

Facts of the case:
Plaintiff was standing on a platform of defendant's railroad after buying a ticket to go to Rockaway Beach. A train stopped at the station, bound for another place. Two men ran forward to catch it. One of the men reached the platform of the car without mishap, though the train was already moving. The other man, carrying a package, jumped aboard the car, but seemed unsteady as if about to fall. A guard on the car, who had held the door open, reached forward to help him in, and another guard on the platform pushed him from behind. In this act, the package was dislodged, and fell upon the rails. It was a package of small size, about fifteen inches long, and was covered by a newspaper. In fact it contained fireworks, but there was nothing in its appearance to give notice of its contents. The fireworks when they fell exploded. The shock of the explosion threw down some scales at the other end of the platform, many feet away. The scales struck the plaintiff, causing injuries for which she sues.

Remedy sought:

Court opinion (including key issues and arguments):
The conduct of the defendant's guard, if a wrong in its relation to the holder of the package, was not a wrong in its relation to the plaintiff, standing far away. Relatively to her it was not negligence at all. Nothing in the situation gave notice that the falling package had in it the potency of peril to persons thus removed. Negligence is not actionable unless it involves the invasion of a legally protected interest, the violation of a right. "Proof of negligence in the air, so to speak, will not do." . . . "Negligence is the absence of care, according to the circumstances.". . . The plaintiff as she stood upon the platform of the station might claim to be protected against intentional invasion of her bodily security. Such invasion is not charged. She might claim to be protected against unintentional invasion by conduct involving in the thought of reasonable men an unreasonable hazard that such invasion would ensue. These, from the point of view of the law, were the bounds of her immunity, with perhaps some rare exceptions, survivals for the most part of ancient forms of liability, where conduct is held to be at the peril of the actor . . . If no hazard was apparent to the eye of ordinary vigilance, an act innocent and harmless, at least to outward seeming, with reference to her, did not take to itself the quality of a tort because it happened to be a wrong, though apparently not one involving the risk of bodily insecurity, with reference to someone else. "In every instance, before negligence can be predicated of a given act, back of the act must be sought and found a duty to the individual complaining, the observance of which would have averted or avoided the injury.". . . "The ideas of negligence and duty are strictly correlative." . . . The plaintiff sues in her own right for a wrong personal to her, and not as the vicarious beneficiary of a breach of duty to another. . . . [W]rong is defined in terms of the natural or probable, at least when unintentional . . . The range of reasonable apprehension is at times a question for the court, and at times, if varying inferences are possible, a question for the jury. Here, by concession, there was nothing in the situation to suggest to the most cautious mind that the parcel wrapped in newspaper would spread wreckage through the station. If the guard had thrown it down knowingly and willfully, he would not have threatened the plaintiff's safety, so far as appearances could warn him. His conduct would not have involved, even then, an unreasonable probability of invasion of her bodily security. Liability can be no greater where the act is inadvertent. If the harm was not willful, he must show that the act as to him had possibilities of danger so many and apparent as to entitle him to be protected against the doing of it though the harm was unintended. DISSENT: Negligence may be defined roughly as an act or omission which unreasonably does or may affect the rights of others, or which unreasonably fails to protect oneself from the dangers resulting from such acts. There must be both the act or the omission, and the right. It is the act itself, not the intent of the actor, that is important . . . In criminal law both the intent and the result are to be considered. Intent again is material in tort actions, where punitive damages are sought, dependent on actual malice-- not on merely reckless conduct. . . . Everyone owes to the world at large the duty of refraining from those acts that may unreasonably threaten the safety of others. Such an act occurs. Not only is he wronged to whom harm might reasonably be expected to result, but he also who is in fact injured, even if he be outside what would generally be thought the danger zone. . . . The right to recover damages rests on additional considerations. The plaintiff's rights must be injured, and this injury must be caused by the negligence . . . [W]hen injuries do result from our unlawful act we are liable for the consequences. It does not matter that they are unusual, unexpected, unforeseen and unforeseeable. But there is one limitation. The damages must be so connected with the negligence that the latter may be said to be the proximate cause of the former. These two words have never been given an inclusive definition. What is a cause in a legal sense, still more what is a proximate cause, depend in each case upon many considerations, as does the existence of negligence itself. . . . A cause, but not the proximate cause. What we do mean by the word "proximate" is, that because of convenience, of public policy, of a rough sense of justice, the law arbitrarily declines to trace a series of events beyond a certain point. This is not logic. It is practical politics. Take our rule as to fires. Sparks from my burning haystack set on fire my house and my neighbor's. I may recover from a negligent railroad. He may not. Yet the wrongful act as directly harmed the one as the other. We may regret that the line was drawn just where it was, but drawn somewhere it had to be. We said the act of the railroad was not the proximate cause of our neighbor's fire. Cause it surely was. The proximate cause, involved as it may be with many other causes, must be, at the least, something without which the event would not happen. The court must ask itself whether there was a natural and continuous sequence between cause and effect. Was the one a substantial factor in producing the other? Was there a direct connection between them, without too many intervening causes? Is the effect of cause on result not too attenuated? Is the cause likely, in the usual judgment of mankind, to produce the result? Or by the exercise of prudent foresight could the result be foreseen? . . . This last suggestion is the factor which must determine the case before us. The act upon which defendant's liability rests is knocking an apparently harmless package onto the platform. The act was negligent. For its proximate consequences the defendant is liable. If its contents were broken, to the owner; if it fell upon and crushed a passenger's foot, then to him. If it exploded and injured one in the immediate vicinity, to him also . . . Mrs. Palsgraf was standing some distance away. How far cannot be told from the record-- apparently twenty-five or thirty feet. Perhaps less. Except for the explosion, she would not have been injured. We are told by the appellant in his brief "it cannot be denied that the explosion was the direct cause of the plaintiff's injuries." So it was a substantial factor in producing the result-- there was here a natural and continuous sequence-- direct connection. The only intervening cause was that instead of blowing her to the ground the concussion smashed the weighing machine which in turn fell upon her. There was no remoteness in time, little in space. And surely, given such an explosion as here it needed no great foresight to predict that the natural result would be to injure one on the platform at no greater distance from its scene than was the plaintiff.

Disposition of case:
The judgment of the Appellate Division and that of the Trial Term should be reversed, and the complaint dismissed, with costs in all courts.

ECONOMIC ANALYSIS OF THE CASE

NOTES AND QUESTIONS 8 1. This case was a close call: a 4-3 majority sustaining Judge Cardozo's curiously nitpicking and unsatisfying opinion over Judge Andrews' view, which did a far better job of indicating the direction to come in the law. Think of the arrangement between the running passenger and the platform guard who boosted him onto the train as a transaction. Then, the injury to Mrs. Palsgraf is an externality. The decision in this case is involved with the question: In the interest of efficiency, should such externalities be internalized, or should they (simply on the ground of their unforeseeability) be disregarded? Cardozo takes the second view in that question. 2. Palsgraf contains an interesting syllabus on the history of three central tort issues: duty, liability, and negligence. Leading cases up to 1927 can be traced by examining an unedited copy of this opinion. 3. Can you think of another issue of negligence on the part of the defendant that was not mentioned in the opinion? Can a scale on a passenger platform be thought to be safely stowed if it can fall over when a parcel of fireworks explodes thirty feet away? 4. Neither judge has much to say about behavioral incentives. What are the incentive issues involved in this decision, and why does the Andrews dissent do a better job of recognizing them? 5. Partly as a consequence of the Palsgraf case, it is now standard practice everywhere for railway employees to discourage running on platforms. Under the standard procedures of today, the unnamed passenger with the package would have been stopped by the platform conductor, not boosted onto the train.