Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad Co.

The elements of negligence are duty, breach, causation, and damages.

Explain the concept of duty, and I know we must explicitly address the Palsgraf dichotomy because that is tested constantly.

Duty is a legal obligation to conform your conduct to a certain standard of care to protect others against unreasonable risks of harm.

Generally, under the common law, you owe a duty of reasonable care to all foreseeable plaintiffs.

And this is where Palsgraf v.

Long Island Railroad comes in, where a man dropped a package of fireworks causing scales to fall on a woman on the other side of the train platform.

This creates a massive fork in the law regarding foreseeability.

Yes.

Now, to a normal person, this sounds like just a tragic freak accident, but if you are a law student, you know this isn't just an accident.

This is the exact fact pattern of Palsgraf versus Long Island Railroad.

The most famous battleground in American torts history, yeah.

Absolutely.

In general, everyone owes a duty to act as a reasonably prudent person to avoid creating unreasonable risks of harm to others.

But the threshold question is-

To whom is this duty owed? This brings us back to our exploding package on the train platform, the Palsgraf versus Long Island Railroad debate.

In Palsgraf, the railroad guards negligently pushed a man, causing him to drop fireworks.