Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad Co., 248 N.Y. 339, 162 N.E. 99 (1928), is a leading case in American tort law on the question of liability to an unforeseeable plaintiff. The case was heard by the New York Court of Appeals, the highest state court in New York; its opinion was written by Chief Judge Benjamin Cardozo, a leading figure in the development of American common law and later a United States Supreme Court justice.
The plaintiff, Helen Palsgraf, was waiting at a Long Island Rail Road station in August 1924 while taking her daughters to the beach. Two men attempted to board the train before hers; one (aided by railroad employees) dropped a package that exploded, causing a large coin-operated scale on the platform to hit her. After the incident, she began to stammer, and subsequently sued the railroad, arguing that its employees had been negligent while assisting the man, and that she had been harmed by the neglect. In May 1927, she obtained a jury verdict of $6,000 , which the railroad appealed. Palsgraf gained a 3–2 decision in the Appellate Division, and the railroad appealed again. Cardozo wrote for a 4–3 majority of the Court of Appeals, ruling that there was no negligence because the employees, in helping the man board, did not breach any duty of care to Palsgraf as injury to her was not a foreseeable harm from aiding a man with a package. The original jury verdict was overturned, and the railroad won the case.
A number of factors, including the bizarre facts and Cardozo's outstanding reputation, made the case prominent in the legal profession, and it remains so, taught to most if not all American law students in torts class. Cardozo's conception, that tort liability can only occur when a defendant breaches a duty of care the defendant owes to a plaintiff, causing the injury sued for, has been widely accepted in American law. In dealing with proximate cause, many states have taken the approach championed by the Court of Appeals' dissenter in Palsgraf, Judge William S. Andrews.
Background At the time of the 1928 New York Court of Appeals decision in Palsgraf, that state's case law followed a classical formation for negligence: the plaintiff had to show that the Long Island Railroad ("LIRR" or "the railroad") had a duty of care, and that she was injured through a breach of that duty. It was not required that she show that the duty owed was to her. Under New York precedent, the usual duty of utmost care that the railroad as a common carrier owed its customers did not apply to platforms and other parts of the station.
Facts
Sunday, August 24, 1924, was a warm summer day in Brooklyn, and Helen Palsgraf, a 40-year-old janitor and housekeeper, was taking her two daughters, Elizabeth and Lillian, aged 15 and 12, to Rockaway Beach. Having paid the necessary fare, they were on the platform at the East New York station of the LIRR on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, when a train, not theirs, pulled in. As it began to move again, two men raced for the train, and one made it without incident, as the doors had not closed. The other, a man carrying a package, leapt aboard, with the help of a platform guard pushing him from behind as a member of the train's crew pulled him into the car. But in the process, the man lost the package, which dropped and exploded, for it apparently contained fireworks. Either the force of the explosion or the panicking of those on the platform caused a tall, coin-operated scale to topple 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.
Contemporaneous accounts and witnesses at trial 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 from the explosion to the scale was described in the Times as "more than ten feet away" (3 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 when the case came to court.
Trial Palsgraf brought suit against the railroad in the Supreme Court of New York, Kings County, a trial-level court, 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 heard 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 for election to the Supreme Court in 1925; he was noted for his courteous and friendly manner. Manhattan lawyers tried the Brooklyn case: Matthew W. Wood, who worked from 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, who tried the case, 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 then for several days, and then the stammering started. Her health forced her to give up her work in mid-1926. 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 scale 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 scale 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 his only remaining witness was a neurologist, an expert witness, and McNamara for the LIRR moved to dismiss the case on the ground that Palsgraf had failed to present evidence of 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 "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 on May 27, 1927 by Justice Humphrey, who did not issue a written opinion, and a judgment was entered on the verdict on May 31, 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. In his later book, Judge Richard 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 LIRR's appeal took the case to 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 decide 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 lawyers argued the case before the Appellate Division in Brooklyn on October 21, 1927. On December 9, the Appellate Division affirmed the trial court's judgment, 3–2. 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 had been born in Stuttgart and came to the United States as a child; he had been elected to the Supreme Court in 1917 and was elevated to the Appellate Division by Governor Al Smith in 1926. Aged 68 at the time of Palsgraf, he could serve only two more years before mandatory retirement. Justice 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 well-known court decisions on causation, such as the Squib case, in which an explosive (a squib) was lit and thrown, then was hurled away 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 of care that the LIRR owed to Palsgraf, one of its customers.Appellate Division ruling in Palsgraf, 222 A.D. at 167–168.