Does a railroad owe a duty of care, and incur liability for negligence, to a bystander standing far from the point of an employee's act when that act involved no foreseeable risk of harm to the bystander?

Helen Palsgraf (plaintiff) was standing on a platform of the Long Island Railroad (defendant) after buying a ticket to Rockaway Beach. A train bound for another destination pulled out of the station, and two men ran to catch it. One reached the car without incident, but the other, carrying a small package wrapped in newspaper, jumped aboard while the train was moving and seemed about to fall. A railroad guard on the car reached forward to help him, and another guard on the platform pushed him from behind. The package was dislodged and fell onto the rails. Unknown to anyone, it contained fireworks, and nothing in its appearance suggested dangerous contents. The fireworks exploded when they fell. The shock of the explosion toppled scales at the other end of the platform, many feet away, and the scales struck Palsgraf, injuring her. She sued the railroad for her injuries.

Palsgraf sued the Long Island Railroad in the trial court, which ruled in her favor. The Appellate Division affirmed the judgment for the plaintiff. The railroad appealed to the New York Court of Appeals, which reversed the judgments of the Appellate Division and the Trial Term and dismissed the complaint, with costs in all courts.

(Cardozo, J.)

No. The railroad is not liable to Palsgraf because its guards' conduct, even if negligent toward the man carrying the package, was not a wrong in relation to her.

Negligence is a term of relation. It is not actionable in the abstract; it must involve the invasion of a legally protected interest, the violation of a right belonging to the plaintiff. "Proof of negligence in the air, so to speak, will not do." Before negligence can be predicated of an act, a duty to the individual complaining must exist, the observance of which would have averted the injury. Negligence and duty are strictly correlative.

The duty is defined by the risk reasonably to be perceived, and risk imports relation: it is risk to another or to others within the range of apprehension. Here, a package wrapped in newspaper gave no notice of any danger to a person standing far down the platform. Nothing in the situation would suggest to the most cautious mind that it would spread wreckage through the station. If the guard had thrown the package down knowingly and willfully, he still would not have threatened the plaintiff's safety so far as appearances could warn him. Liability cannot be greater where the act is inadvertent.

Palsgraf cannot borrow the wrong done to the package's owner. She sues for a wrong personal to her, not as the vicarious beneficiary of a breach of duty to another, and her interest in bodily security is of a different order than the owner's property interest. Because no duty ran to her, there was no tort to redress, and questions of proximate cause and the extent of consequences never arise. The question of liability is anterior to the measure of consequences. The judgments below are reversed and the complaint dismissed.

Dissent (Andrews, J.) Negligence is not relative to a particular plaintiff. Everyone owes the world at large a duty to refrain from acts that unreasonably threaten the safety of others. When such an act occurs, not only those to whom harm might reasonably be expected but also anyone actually injured, even outside the apparent danger zone, is wronged. Palsgraf's claim is original and primary, not derivative. The real question is proximate cause, which is not a matter of philosophical causation but of convenience, public policy, and a rough sense of justice; the law arbitrarily declines to trace events beyond a certain point. Relevant considerations include whether there was a natural and continuous sequence between cause and effect, whether the act was a substantial factor in the result, the number of intervening causes, and remoteness in time and space. The explosion was the direct cause of the injury, the only intervening step was the toppling scales, there was little remoteness in space, and injury to someone on the platform was probable once such an explosion occurred. The plaintiff's injuries could not be held, as a matter of law, to be outside the proximate result of the negligence, and the judgment should be affirmed. Judges Crane and O'Brien concurred in this dissent.