Palsgraf v Long Island Railroad Co

“We are in a field of freak accidents, of crazy concatenations of circumstances, no one of which ever has been duplicated or ever will occur in exactly the same way again”.¹

On a warm summer’s day in August 1924, Helen Palsgraf decided to take her two daughters, Elizabeth and Lillian, to the beach. The plan was to catch a train from East New York Station in Brooklyn to Rockaway Beach in Queens. This would involve a ride on the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR)—a commuter rail system stretching from Manhattan to Long Island.

Established in 1834, the LIRR is the oldest railroad in the USA still operating under its original name. Today, it is the busiest commuter railroad in North America.²

Background — The LIRR’s Accident-Plagued History

The LIRR suffered from a very poor accident record during the 1920’s. In 1921, 50 persons were injured on the LIRR when two trains collided in Brooklyn after an operator missed a stop signal. Carriages were hurled from the rails and one passenger’s right arm was torn off in the accident.³ In 1924, 36 passengers were injured, and one passenger killed, on the LIRR when a worker prematurely threw a switch under a carriage on a commuter train, causing the carriage to be thrown violently to one side and the train to derail.⁴ In 1926, 18 persons were injured, and one passenger killed, when a work train collided with a passenger train on the LIRR in Brooklyn.⁵

The LIRR accident with the most memorable set of factual circumstances, however, was the 1926 derailment of the luxurious Shelter Island Flyer which crashed into a pickle factory. The cost of a coach car seat on this luxury train was double the cost of a seat on a regular train. For ten times the cost, the more prosperous passengers could be pampered in parlour cars—‘Victorian living rooms on wheels with velvet curtains framing the windows, mahogany paneling on the walls and Oriental rugs across the floor’.⁶ Harold Fish, a rich industrialist, was travelling to his summer home in one these luxurious parlour cars. The train’s derailment—caused by a missing pin on a metal lever—saw the locomotive go airborne and fall directly on top of a pickle factory. All 337 passengers in the coach cars survived. Harold Fish was not as lucky. He was thrown out of the parlour car and onto the floor of the pickle factory where he died slowly from suffocation by pickle salt. Six other persons were killed and 28 were seriously injured. The local coroner exonerated the LIRR from blame, although it was later revealed that the coroner was also an employee of the LIRR and had a free railroad pass. Later, a grand jury condemned the LIRR for its apathy and laxness, however, no indictments were handed down.⁷

The Incident — An Ill-Fated Summer’s Day

Unfortunately, a trip on the LIRR was not a pleasure that Mrs Palsgraf and her children would get to experience. After purchasing tickets for the train, Mrs Palsgraf and her girls waited on the platform. A train heading in a different direction pulled into the station and two men raced through the crowded platform towards the train. The first man made the train in time. The second man, who was carrying a small package covered by a newspaper, also managed to leap aboard the train in the nick of time, with the assistance of a train guard who held the doors of the moving train open and pulled him into the carriage, while a platform guard pushed him from behind. Unfortunately, the pushing and tugging caused the man to drop his package onto the rails. Unbeknownst to the railroad employees, the package contained fireworks which, upon being run over by the train’s wheels a few seconds later, caused a number of violent explosions. Pandemonium ensued. Poor Mrs Palsgraf, who was minding her own business at the other end of the platform, witnessed a ball of fire, before the shock of the explosions caused a large coin-operated scale to topple onto her.  

Following the incident, Mrs Palsgraf suffered post-traumatic stress disorder and developed a most unfortunate stammer. She sued the railroad, arguing its employees has been negligent while assisting the man with the fireworks to board the train, and that she had been injured as a result of this negligence. According to Mrs Palsgraf, it was the duty of the LIRR to make and enforce proper rules and regulations for the guidance and control of its guards so that while trains were stopped at, or were passing through, the station, persons on the platform were reasonably free from injury. It was also argued that the LIRR knew that passengers were accustomed to being jostled and pushed about in boarding the trains in such a manner as to endanger life and limb. 

The jury found the LIRR had been negligent and awarded Mrs Palsgraf $6,000 in damages (14 times her annual income). On appeal, Mrs Palsgraf was again successful. The LIRR appealed once more, and the case was heard by the New York Court of Appeals.

The Judgments — A Divided Court

The majority judgment

By a narrow 4-3 majority, the LIRR was victorious. Chief Judge Benjamin Cardozo wrote the judgment for the majority. Cardozo held that the railroad employees, in assisting the man to board the train, did not owe a duty of care to Mrs Palsgraf:

“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. Relative to her it was not negligence at all.”

In other words, according to Cardozo, the existence of a duty turns on the defendant’s relationship to the particular plaintiff, or a class of plaintiffs of which the plaintiff is a member. A crucial fact for Cardozo was that the package of fireworks was unmarked. This meant that the LIRR employees had no reason to be concerned about the welfare of passengers at the other end of the platform. To the LIRR, Mrs Palsgraf was an unforeseeable plaintiff. 

According to Cardozo, there was thus no negligence toward Mrs Palsgraf. The conduct of the LIRR employees—holding the doors of a moving train open while pushing and pulling would-be passengers aboard the train—may be a wrong, Cardozo held, to the passenger holding the package. However, what the plaintiff must show is not simply “wrongful” conduct, but “a wrong” to herself, i.e., a violation of her own right, and not merely a wrong to someone else. Cardozo’s reasoning here is informed by notions of corrective justice. Corrective justice involves a bilateral relationship between the wrongdoer and the victim. The former commits an injustice and the latter suffers this injustice. Here, however, the LIRR’s act, even if wrongful, was not a wrong toward, or suffered by, Mrs Palsgraf. 

Curiously, Cardozo’s judgment failed to recognise that Mrs Palsgraf—who had a purchased a ticket for the LIRR—could have been owed a duty of care as a passenger of the railroad company. Rather, Cardozo’s judgment simply assumed that there was no relationship between Mrs Palsgraf and the LIRR.

The dissent

Judge William S Andrews, in dissent, held that a duty of care arises from an act that creates risk. It does not depend upon a relationship between the plaintiff and the defendant:  

“Due care is a duty imposed on each one of us to protect society from unnecessary danger, not to protect A, B, or C alone.”

Put simply, Andrews felt that the focus should be on the wrongful act. If an act was wrongful, the tortfeasor should be liable for its proximate results. Here, the LIRR’s actions were negligent, and the explosion was the direct cause of Mrs Palsgraf’s injuries. In other words, Mrs Palsgraf’s injuries were the proximate result of the LIRR’s negligence.

A Satisfactory Outcome? — Death and Injury on the Railroads

Palsgraf v Long Island Railroad Co has been described as ’the most famous tort case of modern times’.⁸ Cardozo’s judgment, however, can be criticised for treating the events of this ill-fated summer’s day as an isolated, freak occurrence, rather than part of a long history of railroad incidents. In the year that Mrs Palsgraf was injured, 6,617 persons were killed, and 143,739 were injured, in railroad operations in the USA.⁹ It has been argued that Cardozo’s judgment was formulated in a social and political vacuum that benefited the railroad company, with Cardozo prepared to simply accept death and injury as an unfortunate by-product of running the railroad:

“If judges could see—if not through statistics, then perhaps through the social history of the railroad industry—just how dangerous trains were and how much death and destruction they left in their path, they may have been less inclined to think that Mrs. Palsgraf’s problem was that those two men carried fireworks onto the platform that day”.¹⁰