1. Are all the other elements of a negligence tort satisfied in this case?

2. Who else might Palsgraf have sued? For what?

3. Context is always important. This case was decided before any federal or state benefits for health care or lost time from work. The dissenting opinion in this case argued that public policy demanded that the Railroad pay for the injury because they were in the best position to pay and that some correlation existed between conduct and injury. In the 1928 context, does that strike you as a convincing argument? Why or why not?

Palsgraf bought a railroad ticket for Rockaway Beach, New York, and was waiting on the platform for her train. A different train arrived on a platform 100 yards away, allowed passengers to board, and began to depart from the station. Running to catch the departing train, two commuters grabbed onto the side and tried to hoist themselves up and into the moving car. To aid one of the men, the conductor on the train pulled him onto the train but dislodged a package covered in newspaper that the passenger was carrying. The package, which turned out to be fireworks, fell to the platform and exploded. The blast shook the station with sufficient force that large iron scales (used to weigh freight on various trains) hanging over Palsgraf fell on her, resulting in a severe injury. Palsgraf sued the Long Island Railroad for the conductor’s negligent conduct of pulling the commuter onto the train, which eventually caused the explosion and her injury from the falling scales.

In a famous opinion written by Judge Benjamin Cardozo (who would later serve on the U.S. Supreme Court), the New York Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the Long Island Railroad. Cardozo reasoned that because the conductor could not have knownthat the man he was helping onto the train had a box full of fireworks, the action of the conductor was not a proximate-enough cause to incur liability for Palsgraf’s injuries. 

“[T]he orbit of the danger as disclosed to the eye of reasonable vigilance would be the orbit of the duty. One who jostles one’s neighbor in a crowd does not invade the rights of others standing at the outer fringe when the unintended contact casts a bomb upon the ground. The wrongdoer as to them is the man who carries the bomb, not the one who explodes it without suspicion of the danger. Life will have to be made over, and human nature transformed, before prevision so extravagant can be accepted as the norm of conduct, the customary standard to which behavior must conform. . . . The risk reasonably to be perceived defines the duty to be obeyed, and risk imports relation; it is risk to another or to others within the range of apprehension.”