Helen Palsgraf was standing on a railroad platform when railroad employees helped push a late passenger onto a departing train. The passenger dropped a package containing fireworks, which exploded when it fell. The shock caused scales at the far end of the platform to topple and injure Palsgraf. She sued the Long Island Railroad for negligence.
Does a defendant owe a duty of care in negligence to a plaintiff who was injured by consequences that were not reasonably foreseeable from the defendant’s conduct toward another person?
Negligence is relational and requires breach of a duty owed to the particular plaintiff. A defendant is liable only for harms to plaintiffs who are within the reasonably foreseeable zone of danger created by the defendant’s conduct.
No. The railroad was not liable to Palsgraf because any negligence toward the passenger did not constitute a breach of duty to Palsgraf, who was not a foreseeable plaintiff.
Chief Judge Cardozo reasoned that duty is defined by the range of apprehension: the risk reasonably to be perceived determines the duty to be obeyed. The railroad employees may have acted negligently toward the passenger, but nothing about the package gave notice of danger to a distant bystander on the platform. Because Palsgraf was outside the foreseeable orbit of risk, there was no duty owed to her, and thus no actionable negligence. The court treated foreseeability here as a limitation on duty, not merely on proximate cause.
Judge Andrews dissented, arguing that once negligence is shown, liability should turn on proximate cause rather than on a duty limited to foreseeable plaintiffs. He viewed duty as owed to the world at large and would have left the causation question to the jury, asking whether the injury was a natural and continuous sequence of the negligent act.
Palsgraf is one of the foundational American tort cases on duty, foreseeability, and proximate cause. It is especially important for Cardozo’s view that foreseeability limits duty to foreseeable plaintiffs, contrasted with Andrews’s broader proximate-cause approach. The case is often taught alongside In re Polemis & Furness, Withy & Co., [1921] 3 K.B. 560, which took a broader direct-consequences view, and The Wagon Mound (No. 1), Overseas Tankship (U.K.) Ltd. v. Morts Dock & Engineering Co. Ltd., [1961] A.C. 388, which emphasized foreseeability in remoteness.
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