Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad Co., 248 N.Y. 339, 162 N.E. 99 (1928), was a decision by the New York Court of Appeals, the highest state court in New York, written by Chief Judge Benjamin Cardozo, a leading figure in the development of American common law and later a Supreme Court justice. Palsgraf is a landmark decision in tort law that helped establish the concept of proximate cause, a limitation of negligence with respect to scope of liability.
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Facts
Sunday, August 24, 1924 was a very hot day in New York City, and Helen Palsgraf, a 40-year-old janitor and housekeeper, who lived at 238 Irving Avenue, Brooklyn, was taking her two daughters, aged 15 and 12, to Rockaway Beach, New York. They were on the platform at the East New York station of the Long Island Rail Road ("LIRR" or "the railroad") on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, when a train, not theirs, pulled into the station. As it began to move again, a man carrying a package ran for that train, as the doors had not closed. He leapt aboard, but was unsteady as he landed, and a platform guard pushed him from behind as a member of the train's crew pulled him into the car. The passenger made the train, but lost the package, which dropped and exploded, apparently containing fireworks. Either the force of the explosion or the panicking of those on the platform caused a large penny scale to fall onto Helen Palsgraf. No one was hurt enough to spend the night in the hospital, though several people, Palsgraf among them, were listed as injured.
Contemporary accounts and the trial transcript described the man as Italian in appearance, and there was speculation that the package was being taken for use at an Italian-American celebration of some sort; no great effort was made to identify the owner. Palsgraf's injury was listed in The New York Times as shock; she also suffered bruising. The distance between Helen Palsgraf and the explosion was never made clear in the trial transcript, or in the opinions of the judges who ruled on the case, but the distance between the explosion and the scale was described in the Times as "more than ten feet away" (3.1 metres). Several days after the incident, she developed a bad stammer, and her doctor testified at trial that it was due to the trauma of the events at East New York station. She had not recovered from the stammer as of the time of the trial. Palsgraf, a lifelong resident of New York City, had been married to a Michael Palsgraf, tinsmith, but was not living with him at the time of the 1927 trial.
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Procedural history
Trial
Palsgraf brought suit against the railroad in the Supreme Court of New York, Kings County in Brooklyn on October 2, 1924, the summons was served the following month and the defendant filed its answer on December 3. The case was tried on May 24 and 25, 1927, with Justice Burt Jay Humphrey presiding. Humphrey had served for over twenty years on the county court in Queens before unexpectedly being nominated to the trial-level Supreme Court in 1925; he was noted for his courteous and friendly manner. Matthew W. Wood, with an office at 233 Broadway (the Woolworth Building) represented Palsgraf, while Joseph F. Keany, whose office was at Pennsylvania Station, was for the railroad, along with William McNamara. Wood was an experienced solo practitioner with two degrees from Ivy League schools; Keany had headed the LIRR's legal department for twenty years--McNamara was one of the department's junior lawyers, who had advanced from clerk to counsel after graduation from law school. At trial, Palsgraf testified that she had been hit in the side by the scale, and had been treated at the scene, and then took a taxicab home. She testified to trembling for several days, and then the stammering started. Her health forced her to give up her work in mid-1926. Attorney Wood called Herbert Gerhardt, an engraver, who had seen the man with the package hurry towards the train, and whose wife had been hit in the stomach in the man's rush. He testified that the scales had been "blown right to pieces".
On the second day of the trial, Wood called Dr. Karl A. Parshall, Palsgraf's physician. He testified that he had treated Palsgraf occasionally for minor ailments before the incident at East New York, but on the day after found her shaken and bruised. He gave it as his opinion that Palsgraf's ills were caused by the accident. Grace Gerhardt, Herbert's wife, was the next witness. She testified to being hit by one of "the two young Italian fellows" who were racing to make the train, and how one made it unaided and the other only with the help of two LIRR employees. She had nothing to say about the scales or Palsgraf, having seen neither. Elizabeth and Lillian Palsgraf, the elder and younger daughter of the plaintiff, were next to testify and spoke of what they had seen. Wood indicated that only remaining witness he had was a neurologist, an expert witness, and McNamara for the LIRR moved to dismiss the case on the ground that Palsgraf had failed to make a case for negligence, but Justice Humphrey denied it. The neurologist, Graeme M. Hammond of Manhattan, had examined Palsgraf two days before, observing her stammering, speaking only with difficulty. She told him of depression and headaches. He diagnosed her with traumatic hysteria, for which the explosion was a plausible cause, and said the hysteria was likely to continue as long as the litigation did, for only once it was resolved were the worries connected with it likely to vanish.
Wood rested his case on behalf of the plaintiff; McNamara offered no evidence but again moved to dismiss, which Humphrey denied. The judge told the all-male jury that if the LIRR employees "did nothing which ordinarily prudent and careful train employees should do in regard to passengers moving upon their trains, then there can be no liability. If they omitted to do the things which prudent and careful trainmen do for the safety of those who are boarding their trains, as well as the safety of those who are standing upon the platform waiting for other trains, and that the failure resulted in the plaintiff's injury, then the defendant would be liable." The jury was out for two hours and 35 minutes, including the lunch hour, and they awarded Palsgraf $6,000. Pursuant to statute, she also recovered costs of $142, an amount added to the verdict. A motion for a new trial was denied by Justice Humphrey on May 27, who did not issue a written opinion, and a judgment was entered on the verdict on May 31, 1927, from which the LIRR appealed on June 14. Once Palsgraf had gotten her jury verdict, the Gerhardts also sued the railroad, with Wood as their counsel.
William H. Manz, in his article on the facts in Palsgraf, suggested that neither side spent much time preparing for trial. Wood did not contact his fact witnesses, the Gerhardts, until shortly before the trial, and Palsgraf was examined by Dr. Hammond the day before the trial started. McNamara, one of the most junior members of the LIRR's legal team, called no witnesses and Manz suggested the entire defense strategy was to get the judge to dismiss the case. Judge Richard A. Posner indicated that the much-sued LIRR did not present a better case than the first-time plaintiff: "it put on a bargain-basement defense".
Initial appeal
The case was heard before the Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court, for the Second Department, the state's intermediate appeals court. In its briefs before the Appellate Division, the LIRR argued that the verdict had been contrary to the law and the evidence. It stressed that it had no foreknowledge that the package was dangerous, and that no law required it to search the contents of passenger luggage. The brief stated that given this, there was no negligence in helping a man make a train, and even if there was, that negligence was not the proximate cause of Palsgraf's injuries. Wood, for Palsgraf, argued that the jury verdict finding negligence was supported by undisputed facts, and should not be questioned by the appellate courts. The plaintiff's brief also suggested that the failure of the railroad to call as witnesses the employees who had aided the man should resolve any inferences of negligence against it. Wood deemed the trainmen guilty of a "dereliction of duty", misconduct that was the proximate cause of Palsgraf's injuries.
The case was argued before the Appellate Division on October 21, 1927. On December 9, the Appellate Division affirmed the trial court's judgment, 3-2. Justice Albert H. F. Seeger wrote the majority opinion for the five justices hearing the case, and was joined by Justices William F. Hagarty and William B. Carswell. Seeger ruled that the finding of negligence by the jury was supported by the evidence, and speculated that the jury might have found that helping a passenger board a moving train was a negligent act. He wrote that while the set of facts might be novel, the case was no different in principle from other well-known court decisions on causation, such as the Squib case, in which an explosive (a squib) was lit and then thrown repeatedly by people not wanting to be hurt until it exploded near the plaintiff, injuring him; his suit against the man who had set the squib in motion was upheld. The majority also focused on the high degree of duty that the LIRR owed to Palsgraf, one of its customers. The court affirmed the jury verdict. Presiding Justice Edward Lazansky (joined by Justice J. Addison Young) wrote a dissent. Lazansky did not question the jury finding of negligence, but felt that the employees' conduct was not the proximate cause of Palsgraf's injuries, since the man's conduct in bringing a package that might explode to a crowded passenger station was an independent act of negligence, rendering the negligence by the railroad too remote for there to be liability.
Court of Appeals
The LIRR had an appeal as of right to the Court of Appeals (the highest court in New York) as there had been a dissent in the Appellate Division. The railroad argued again that Palsgraf had failed to establish that she had come to harm through the railroad's negligence: that there was no negligence, and even if there was, there was no harm by it done to Palsgraf, since such injury was not "a natural and probable consequence of assisting a man to board a train". Its brief alleged that the trainmen could not have stopped the man from boarding, and once he had flung himself onto the train, had little choice but to help him, "faced with such an emergency they cannot be charged with negligence because they elected to assist the man rather than stand idly by and leave him to his fate." Wood, for his part, argued that negligence had been found by the jury, and by both majority and dissenting justices in the Appellate Division. He wrote that there were many facts from which the jury could have found negligence, including the fact that the train had not shut its doors as it departed (though whether this was to allow latecomers to board or because it was a hot August day is uncertain). The case was argued before the Court of Appeals on February 24, 1928.
Cardozo and his opinion
The Chief Judge of the Court of Appeals, Benjamin N. Cardozo was a judge who was greatly respected; he would end his life on the U.S. Supreme Court, the second Jew to serve there. After a standout legal career, Cardozo had been elected to the trial-level Supreme Court in 1913, but was quickly designated for service on the Court of Appeals. He was in 1917 appointed a judge of that court, and in 1926 was elected chief judge by the voters.
The Court of Appeals reversed and dismissed Palsgraf's complaint, deciding that the relationship of the guard's action to Palsgraf's injury was too indirect to make him liable. Mrs. Palsgraf was also ordered, as a matter of routine practice at the time, to pay the railroad's legal expenses, estimated at $350 (about a year's pay for an average worker at the time, but about three times her annual income); however, the railroad never attempted to collect the payment.
Cardozo, writing for three other judges, wrote that there was no way that the guard could have known that the package wrapped in newspaper was dangerous, and that pushing the passenger would thereby cause an explosion. The court wrote that "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." Without any perception that one's actions could harm someone, there could be no duty towards that person, and therefore no negligence for which to impose liability. (Duty is a matter of law to be decided by a judge; therefore, a finding that there was no duty was sufficient to overturn the jury's verdict that the defendant was liable; however the case can be, and often is, read to establish that the guard did not breach a duty established by the heightened duty of care owed by a common carrier.)
The court also stated that whether the guard had acted negligently to the passenger he pushed was irrelevant for her claim, because the only negligence that a person can sue for is a wrongful act that violates their own rights. Palsgraf could not sue the guard for pushing the other passenger because that act did not violate a duty to her, as is required for liability under a negligence theory. It is not enough for a plaintiff to merely claim an injury. "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."
This concept of foreseeability in tort law tends to limit liability to the consequences of an act that could reasonably be foreseen rather than every single consequence that follows. Otherwise, liability could be unlimited in scope, as causes never truly cease having effects far removed in time and space (comp. the Butterfly Effect).
Because of the vague nature of Palsgraf's sole injury, some legal scholars have suggested that Cardozo reversed the jury's verdict to erase a fraudulent claim.
Dissenting opinion
The three-judge dissent, written by Judge Andrews and joined by Judges Frederick Crane and John F. O'Brien, by contrast, saw the case as a matter of proximate cause--Palsgraf's injury could be immediately traced to the wrong committed by the guard, and the fact of the wrong and the fact of the injury should be enough to find negligence (unlike duty, proximate cause is a matter of fact to be determined by a jury; therefore, the dissent would have upheld the jury's verdict for the plaintiff).
The dissent took note of recent expansions in New York state tort law, that allowed children to sue for the wrongful death of a parent, and spouses for loss of consortium, arguing that these expansions were based on the fact of injury beyond the foreseen injury of the deceased, and on the needs of public policy. "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." Palsgraf v. Long Island R.R. Co., 248 N.Y. 339, 352, 162 N.E. 99, 103 (1928)
Legal significance
Palsgraf is standard reading for first-year tort students in many, if not most American law schools.
The Palsgraf case established foreseeability as the test for proximate cause.
Popular culture
The American author William Gaddis credited his reading of the Palsgraf case with helping to inspire his novel A Frolic of His Own.
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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