Created By: Alyse Nagel, Alex, Sunny, Natasha, and Kenta

 Tort of Negligence: Breach of a duty by a wrong doer of a reasonable standard of care that is recognized by society as being reasonable.

 Breach of duty: Breach of duty was the cause of harm to plaintiff. Law provides remedy.  Standard of care: Reasonably prudent person would abide by, different for every person/profession.  Malice: Malice is conduct engaged in by a wrong doer that is not necessarily intentional but is extremely reckless, law implies that person acting with malice may have to pay punitive damages. (punitive damages are awarded in only rare instances of malicious and willful conduct).

 Duty of care: A reasonable duty of care to protect the plaintiff of certain types of harm. One has to exercise his/her own judgment to avoid subjecting people to harm.  Breach of duty of care: Not abiding by a reasonable standard of conduct that would cause someone harm.

 Breach causing harm in fact: A breach where someone is physically harmed with the intention of causing harm.  Proximate cause: A situation where there is more than one factor that caused the injury or harm.  All must be present to claim negligence.

 Plaintiff (Palsgraf )was standing on a platform of defendant’s railroad (Long Island Railroad Company) when a train stopped (which was headed in a different direction than the train plaintiff was boarding).  Even though it was already moving, two men ran to catch the train.  One got on the train with no problem. The other, who was carrying a 15-inch package wrapped in newspaper, appeared to lose his balance while attempting to board the moving train.  A guard on the car reached out to help him, while another guard on the platform pushed him from behind onto the train. This act caused the package in the man’s arm to dislodge and fall onto the rails.

 Although the package appeared non- descript, it in fact contained fireworks.  When the package fell, the fireworks exploded, causing some large scales at the other end of the platform to strike the plaintiff, causing injuries for which the plaintiff sued.

package

Defendant: Long Island Railroad Company Plaintiff: Helen Palsgraf Court of Appeals

 Plaintiff’s Claim: The railroad station conduct of its employees to help passengers get on trains while the train is moving are negligent acts and harmed Palsgraf physically.

 Appellant's Claim: Ms. Palsgraf failed to establish that her injuries resulted from the defendant's negligence, and that her case should have been dismissed by the State Circuit Court in Kings County, New York.

 Courts: The trial court found for the plaintiff. Defendants appealed and the appellate court affirmed the judgment. The railroad then appealed to appeal court. The Court of Appeals of New York reversed the decision with Judge Andrews dissenting. There was no negligence for which to impose liability.

 "If the harm was not willful, he must show that the act as to him had possibilities of danger so many and apparent as to entitle him to be protected against the doing of it though the harm was unintended."

 Moral: Palsgraf just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. She can’t do anything about what happened because it is no ones fault. The train employee was just trying to help a man board the train and dropped his box, which unfortunately happened to explode.

 Q: Did the railroad’s negligence proximately cause plaintiff’s injuries?  A: The railroad is not liable because the injury had been unforeseeable.  Judges: "there was nothing in the situation to suggest to the most cautious mind that the parcel wrapped in newspaper would spread wreckage through the station. If the guard had thrown it down knowingly and willfully, he would not have threatened the plaintiff's safety, so far as appearances could warn him." Without any perception that one's actions could harm someone, there could be no duty towards that person, and therefore no negligence for which to impose liability.

 Q: Should Palsgraf be able to sue the railroad company for negligence and for pushing the other passenger?  A: No, because claiming the railroad employee had acted negligently was irrelevant to her claim. The only negligence a person can sue for is a wrongful act that violates their own rights. The employee did not intend to hurt anyone, he was merely trying to help a passenger board a train. This was not Palsgraf's problem because it did not violate a duty to her

 "the basis of an action for negligence must be a violation of the plaintiff's own right, and not merely a wrong against someone else."  “This concept of foreseeability in tort law tends to limit liability to the consequences of an act that could reasonably be foreseen rather than every single consequence that follows. Otherwise, liability could be unlimited in scope, as causes never truly cease having effects far removed in time and space (ex. the Butterfly Effect ).”

The foreseeable or natural results of a negligent act affect a determination of whether the act is a proximate cause of the injuries. The dissenters, therefore, reasoned "given such an explosion as here, it needed no great foresight to predict that the natural result would be to injure one on the platform at no greater distance from its scene than was the plaintiff."

"preponderance of the evidence": 1. The defendant owed a duty to the plaintiff (or a duty to the general public, including the plaintiff); 2. The defendant violated that duty; 3. As a result of the defendant's violation of that duty, the plaintiff suffered injury; and 4. The injury was a reasonably foreseeable consequence of the defendant's action or inaction.

“In the law, a proximate cause is an event sufficiently related to a legally recognizable injury to be held the cause of that injury. There are two types of causation in the law, cause-in- fact and proximate (or legal) cause. Cause-in-fact is determined by the "but-for" test: but for the action, the result would not have happened. For example, but for running the red light, the collision would not have occurred. For an act to cause a harm, both tests must be met; proximate cause is a legal limitation on cause-in-fact.” Said by wiki

 The case that established this was Leon A. Green, The Rationale of Proximate Cause (1927).  Hynes v. New York Central Railroad Company, 231 N.Y. 229, 131 N.E. 898 (N.Y. 1921), which held that the defendant railway owed a duty of care despite the victims being trespassers.

 Ms. Palsgraf's injuries were not the result of negligence on the part of the Long Island Railroad Company or its employees.  The Court of Appeals of New York reversed the decision.

 Negligence is not a tort unless it results in the commission of a wrong by violating one’s right. If the harm was not willful, it must be shown that the act had possibilities of apparent danger.  Since the harm to plaintiff was not willful on the part of defendant, it had to be shown that the act of dropping a package had the apparent possibility of danger. Since there was nothing on the outside of the package which would cause the reasonable person to believe it contained explosives, there was no negligence and therefore railroad was also not the proximate cause of plaintiff’s injuries.

 This case established the principle in TORT LAW that one who is negligent is liable only for the harm or the injury that is fore- seeable and not for every injury that follows from his or her NEGLIGENCE.  Socially: People may stop being good Samaritans if what could not be foreign was part of there responsibility. This rail road case is a example of this.  Economically: Jury awards for business negligence cases -- where plaintiffs were injured as a result of employee, company or company-agent negligence -- rose sharply during the latter half of the 1990s, while awards for personally injury cases were largely unchanged. Business negligence cases 1994 $150, $171, $200, $200, $250, $341,703...

 In the United States, statistics show that approximately every two hours a railroad accident occurs in which a pedestrian or vehicle is struck by a train.  In 2007, there were 13,067 railroad related accidents, according to the Federal Railroad Administration's Office of Safety Analysis.  851 deaths and 8,801 non-fatal injuries. Of the deaths, 338 occurred at highway railroad crossings and 473 were a result of trespassing on railroad rights-of-way and property.  The statistics show that of the railroad accident injuries in 2007, 1,031 happened at highway railroad crossings and 398 of the injuries occurred due to trespassing.

 The primary causes of train crashes and derailments that resulted in deaths and injuries in 2007 were:  Human Factors, causing 38.2% of railroad accidents;  Track Defects, causing 34.94% of railroad accidents;  Miscellaneous Causes, causing 12.81% of railroad accidents;  Equipment Defects, causing 12.27% of railroad accidents; and  Signal Defects, causing 1.76% of railroad accidents. 

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