So the Palsgraf decision, detailed in chapter 8, talks about the zone of liability of the Long Island Rail Road as does liability accrue to a business if an injury occurs on its property and it was not a foreseeable action. In Palsgraf, litigated in the highest court in the New York, saw a case where a passenger on the Long Island Railroad brought fireworks onto a train. He was late to catch the train, conductors push hum onto the moving train as it was departing, and the firework slipped out of his hands, launching and hitting a passenger named Palsgraff far away from the train. The fireworks caused injury to Mrs. Palsgraf and she sued the Long Island Railroad for damages.

The question here is, should the Long Island Railroad be liable for this injury? Remember: this occurred in 1915, the injury was not deemed not to be foreseeable, and was concluded that there wasn't much that the railroad could have done to prevent this injury. The court struggled with assigning liability to the railroad under these conditions.

Your assignment in this discussion post is to:

1. Detail what negligence is, and what needs to be proven in court in order to with a negligence suit.

2 Analyze the facts of the Palsgraf decision in our text. Tell me why is would or would not be fair to assign liability to the railroad under these circumstances.

3. If you owned a store, and a customer were to give complain of labor pains, and because of a lack of time gave birth in the store, and the baby later died from not having the proper health care facilities to have a healthy birth, could you sue the owner for an unforeseeable event for the child's death? How would you correlate that scenario to Palsgraf?