Law Library
School of Law
The Palsgraf Case: Courts, Law, and
Society in 1920s New York
Publisher: LexisNexis/Matthew Bender
Newark, NJ
2005, 178 pages
This book presents a historical study of Palsgraf v. Long Island
Railroad (1928), the most famous negligence decision in American
legal history. It tells for the first time the full story of the
case of Helen Palsgraf, a Brooklyn cleaning woman, who was injured
in a bizarre fireworks accident at the Long Island Railroad station
in East New York, and how she lost her $6,000 judgment because of a
landmark New York Court of Appeals decision written by future
Supreme Court Justice Benjamin N. Cardozo. The book places the case
within the context of legal culture in New York in the 1920s, as
well as within the lives and careers of all the participants,
including all 13 judges who were eventually involved with the case.
Also considered are the case’s unusual facts and the controversy
over whether the accident could have occurred as it was described
in Cardozo’s opinion.
“The author of this most recent presentation of the Palsgraf
case deserves to be congratulated not only for the scholarship
manifested in this valuable contribution to legal history, but also
for reminding the reader of the human element inherent in the cases
that are often recited glibly as though they dealt with inanimate
objects, rather than human beings who are or may be severely
affected by the impersonal decision or “holding” of the
court.”
— New York Law Journal, December 28, 2005