162 N.E. 99 (N.Y. 1928), New York Court of Appeals

Facts
A passenger carrying a package, while hurrying to catch and board a moving Long Island Rail Road train, appeared to the railroad's (Defendant's) employee to be falling. The employee attempted to help the passenger and caused a package the passenger was holding to fall on the rails. Unbeknownst to the employee, the package contained fireworks, and the employee's effort to help caused the package to explode. The shock reportedly knocked down scales at the other end of the platform (although later accounts suggest that a panicking bystander may have upset the scale), which injured Mrs. Helen Palsgraf (Plaintiff). Palsgraf sued the railroad, claiming her injury resulted from negligent acts of the employee. The trial court and the intermediate appeals court found for Palsgraf (Plaintiff) by verdict from a jury, Long Island Rail Road appealed the judgment.

Opinion of the court
The Court of Appeals (the highest court in New York) reversed and dismissed Palsgraf's complaint, deciding that the relationship of the guard's action to Palsgraf's injury was too indirect to make him liable.

Cardozo, writing for three other judges, wrote that there was no way that the guard could have known that the package wrapped in newspaper was dangerous, and that pushing the passenger would thereby cause an explosion. The court wrote that "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.

The court also stated that whether the guard had acted negligently to the passenger he pushed was irrelevant for her claim, because the only negligence that a person can sue for is a wrongful act that violates their own rights. Palsgraf could not sue the guard for pushing the other passenger because that act did not violate a duty to her, as is required for liability under a negligence theory. It is not enough for a plaintiff to merely claim an injury. "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."

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.

Dissenting opinion
The three-judge dissent, written by Judge Andrews, by contrast, saw the case as a matter of proximate cause—Palsgraf's injury could be immediately traced to the wrong committed by the guard, and the fact of the wrong and the fact of the injury should be enough to find negligence.

The dissent took note of recent expansions in New York state tort law, that allowed children to sue for the wrongful death of a parent, and spouses for loss of consortium; arguing that these expansions were based on the fact of injury beyond the foreseen injury of the deceased, and on the needs of public policy. "What we do mean by the word 'proximate' is, that because of convenience, of public policy, of a rough sense of justice, the law arbitrarily declines to trace a series of events beyond a certain point. This is not logic. It is practical politics."