So the Palsgraf decision is famous for a few reasons. One, the judge that authored it, Judge Cardozo just an incredible figure in the history of tort law, and he has a writing style that is kind of beautiful and irritating at the same time. And so you read Judge Cardozo opinions and you think, wow, you know, that, that's almost like Shakespeare, but you could have said that so much simpler. And so his opinions can be a bit tricky. And Palsgraf, perhaps most famously of any decision in all of tort law, is a tricky, tricky case. The basic facts are this, there's a guy and he's running, hoping to catch a train. The train is starting to pull away, and he's carrying a package and he's running with this package. He tries to get on the train. He jumps on and then a man on the train is trying to help steady him after he's gotten onto the train and somehow the package shakes loose. The package gets dropped onto the tracks and the package explodes. It turns out it was full of explosives or fireworks. It explodes, ends up a long way off, way down on the train platform. Knocking over a scale that I imagine was used to, to weigh luggage or something like that, and the scale injures a woman named Mrs. Palsgraf, and she gets hurt and she sues Long Island Railroad Company. Mrs. Palsgraf asserted a negligence claim against Long Island Railroad Company. And she alleged that they were careless and it ends up on appeal at New York's highest court. The best way to talk through it is to think about each of the elements of negligence: Injury. We clearly have an injury. We also have a duty, in a certain sense at least. We have a duty because Mrs. Palsgraf is a customer of the railroad, obviously there's going to be a duty that the railroad take reasonable care to avoid causing her injury. We have a breach, and that's where it starts to get a little bit complicated is, is asking about breach and causation. And the breach issue is challenging because, well, maybe there was a breach here. Because after all, you could allege that the train workers should have been very careful in the way that they handled this man. Maybe if they had been more careful and instead of grabbing him, let him just land on his own. And maybe he wouldn't have dropped the package. And then the question then would be causation. Certainly we have, but-for causation. If he hadn't dropped the package, then there wouldn't have been the injury of Mrs. Palsgraf. But we have a question of proximate causation. Part of why the reasoning in the Palsgraf decision is so complicated, the law of proximate cause was different in the era when this case was decided. I believe the 1930s. The way that proximate cause was viewed as a question of directness. Did the thing that happened flow as a direct result of the alleged carelessness? Proximate cause doesn't come up explicitly within the Palsgraf decision, even though to a modern law student, it maybe seems like it. Instead what comes up is a lot of discussion of duty. Judge Cardozo talks about duty and says, well, maybe there was a breach of, of a duty, but. If there was a breach of a duty, it was a breach of a duty owed to Package Man. No duty owed to Mrs. Palsgraf was breached, because the duties to Mrs. Palsgraf don't include mishandling Package Man. The duties to her would be like, maintain a safe platform,make sure it's clear of snow, things like that. And so the breach of the duty, if any, was only a breach of a duty to Package Man. And the, the court of appeals comes to what under modern law, we would say, is the right result. No liability here, but for reasons that are confusing to a modern law student. And so the case gets resolved on duty, even. It’s very much thought of by, in today's world as a proximate cause decision, and is in fact invoked as an example of proximate cause because it's so, unforeseeable, because it's so odd that scales would be knocked down and that Mrs. Palsgraf would be hurt, you know, way the heck over there, way down the platform. And the explosion occurred far away from her and was itself unexpected in a certain way. Who thinks that package guys is containing a package full of explosives or fireworks rather than, you know, a book or something like that? But Judge Cardozo decides the case on breach and duty grounds rather than on proximate cause grounds.