The Long Island Rail Road and the case of the exploding package

Long Island Business News, Jul 13, 2007 by Ross Daly

Helen Palsgraf got her day in court, again, in the case of the exploding fireworks on the Long Island Rail Road.

Unfamiliar with the case? Perhaps you also don't know that Lenin has died, Washington is plagued by the Teapot Dome Scandal and Babe Ruth hit 46 homers this season.

Welcome back to 1924. Last month, the Historical Society of the Courts of the State of New York staged an argument of a nearly century-old case, Palsgraf v. Long Island R.R. Co., a landmark in the development of U.S. tort law. The case is read by nearly all first-year law students and was reargued for the third time before a mock five-judge Appeals Court.

On Aug. 24, 1924, two men tried to jump aboard a moving train at the LIRR's East New York station. Two railroad employees, one on the train and one on the platform, tried to assist one of the men aboard, and as they did the man dropped the package he was carrying. Filled with fireworks, it exploded, sending smoke and shattered glass across the platform.

The blast knocked over a scale on the platform, injuring Palsgraf, a 40-year-old resident of the Brooklyn section of Ridgewood who was taking her two daughters to Rockaway Beach. She sued the railroad for damages and a jury awarded her $6,000.

"The railroad was unlikely to engender much sympathy from a Brooklyn jury," William H. Mann wrote in an article examining the case. "The line was a popular target of articles and letters in New York area newspapers complaining about - poorly maintained equipment, a lack of cleanliness, meaningless schedules and overcrowded trains." (Any of that sound familiar?)

The railroad took the decision to the Appellate Court and lost. But in 1928, the New York Court of Appeals, the state's highest court, finally overturned the decision by a 4-3 vote. In all, 13 judges had heard the case and ruled, in a cumulative tally, 7-6 in favor of the railroad.

Court of Appeals Chief Judge Benjamin Cardozo, who would go on to an esteemed career as a Supreme Court judge, wrote in his ruling that the package had fallen to the tracks. But at the moot court, John Bracken of Bracken and Margolin LLP in Islandia - arguing on Palsgraf's behalf at the Nassau County Bar Association office in Mineola - disagreed.

"The package fell in the gap!" Bracken said. "The Long Island Rail Road had a gap between the train and the platform."

The railroad was negligent and had a duty to protect its riders, Bracken argued.

"Would you advocate that the LIRR should search packages to make sure they are safe?" asked Nassau County District Judge Susan Kluewer, one of the Appeals Court "justices."

No, said Bracken, though looking forward from 1928, he conceded, "Someday that may happen."

Prof. Eileen Kaufman of the Touro Law Center in Central Islip argued for the railroad. "It is our position that the extraordinary events that unfolded here could not have been foreseen," she said.

That argument failed to persuade Kluewer or "justice" Jonathan Dachs, a partner at Shayne, Dachs, Stanisci, Corker & Sauer in Mineola. But it did work for "judges" Ute Lally, a real-life Nassau County Supreme Court justice, and Nassau County Executive Thomas Suozzi.

The danger, Suozzi said, could not have been foreseen, "even with the impending Sacco and Vanzetti trial. Even with Italian anarchists roaming our streets!" (Sacco and Vanzetti were actually executed in 1927, the year before the Court of Appeals heard the Palsgraf case.)

The ruling came down to the "chief judge," A. Thomas Levin of Meyer, Suozzi, English & Klein P.C. in Garden City. In two previous historical society mock hearings, Palsgraf and the LIRR were each 1- 1; breaking the tie in what he called the "rubber game of the match," Levin voted to uphold Cardozo's original decision.

Once again, the railroad was victorious, and Levin concluded the night with a melodious opinion:

"Here's to you, Mrs. Palsgraf, Cardozo loathes you more than you will know, wo, wo, wo! Here's to you, Mrs. Palsgraf, in New York the railroads never pay, hey, hey, hey!"