This is a sickly plaintiff, though: a walking eggshell.
Now, if he'd been a hemophiliac, who had simply bled to death as a result of the accident, he'd recover. That's a classic case of the eggshell plaintiff: take your plaintiff as you find him. If the injuries are over and beyond what the average person would have suffered, so be it, even if the extent of the harm is not foreseeable.
Here it's less direct, but it's an all-or-nothing thing: we permit recovery for the full extent of the damages (later we'll see that the extent of the damages might be mitigated if we found, for example, that he had only a week left to live).
So the eggshell plaintiff rule just says there should be liability for the full extent of the harm on the basis of causation. Other factors can still mitigate the spectrum of damages, though. (see, e.g., Dillon in note 3 on page 403).
Different kinds of harm than you expected. Negligently dropped boards don't tend to explode whole ships. So what, though? If you negligently cause damage, you negligently cause damage.
Still, there's still a limit to damages: direct consequences of the negligence (big and small alike, foreseeable and unforeseeable, but not indirect).
Here the fire, though, is apparently not a direct enough result of the spill.
So what about the Hand formula in this context? Could we come to the conclusion that the defendant wasn't negligent, in the sense that the risk of this particular harm was too minute? That would have been an avenue to avoid discussing proximate cause altogether.
Some ironies here: the foreseeability standard doesn't really give us a lot to go on in terms of tort doctrine. It doesn't tell us which are the foreseeable injuries, and it doesn't deal with directness. It's a little bit intractable or awkward. So Wagon Mound is not a very popular result. And, in related litigation (note 10 on p. 414), there was recovery for some of the ships in neighboring berts.
This is strange: the same accident, different results.
Obviously, the court is struggling, and the concept it provides is sort of unworkable.
So how do we square this with the eggshell plaintiff? Well, for one thing, this wasn't an eggshell plaintiff. Wagon Mound stands for the proposition that there's no liability for an unforeseeable TYPE of harm. Eggshell plaintiff talks about EXTENT of harm, not type.
But even so, this rule on foreseeability is more extreme than most US courts would accept. US courts might play with proximate cause some, but they're probably not going to be as strict as foreseeability.
When is the defendant's negligence a substantial factor? When the harm is of the same general nature as the defendant's negligence. And here it's not.
This is sort of like Wagon Mound: did the defendant here fail to take reasonable care to prevent rape? Well, what was the degree of that risk? The court is unwilling to hold the defendant accountable for this particular harm.
See, though note 6 on p. 423: the way the facts are characterized are important. The more specifically the facts are characterized, the less foreseeable things seem. Plaintiff's counsel generally wants to speak more generally for this reason. Counsel for the defendant wants to speak of specifics, because they seem less foreseeable.
Take heed, though, plaintiff's counsel: if you speak too generally, it's obvious, and the court will catch on.
But wait: we have an innocent plaintiff who was harmed, and a guilty defendant. Why should the defendant get off just because there were some extreme intervening circumstances? We want to limit liability when the intervening circumstances are vastly worse than the defendant's acts: otherwise we'd be over-deterring.
Frequently, also, far-reaching searches for defendants arise when the most responsible party is absent or insolvent. Courts are reluctant to extend severe liability far when the defendant's negligence is not of the same caliber as the harm suffered.
Mrs. Palsgraf was taking her youngest 2 daughters to the beach. She worked as a cleaning woman, incidentally, earning $2/day. There's total chaos after the blast: kids screaming, etc. It turns out other passengers were injured, and she wasn't too badly off. She did visit her doctor 25x in the next 2.5 months, and she began to stutter and stammer. This was the major element of damages, and a neurologist testified that she suffered from traumatic hysteria that would last for several years.
The accident was in AUG 1924, and the tial wasn't until 1927. Jury judgment was $6K-- this was a huge windfall, given her income. Intermediate appellate court affirms. Reversed (by a narrow margin) on appeal. As a final bit of irony, she got assessed costs in all courts (this was probably about a year of her income). She went mute after this.
Maybe this isn't so bad after all-- the injury was sort of remote, and maybe it wasn't such bad harm after all. She gets a bum rap, but sometimes accidents happen. But it's interesting to note that all the facts most relevant to Helen are made to be legally irrelevant: they are left out of the opinion altogether. Now, this case really is about Mrs. Palsgraf and her daughters-- her problem was that she was dir poor and her speech impediment interfered with her ability to get better employment. But that falls out of the opinion totally. Maybe Cardozo lacks empathy, in this opinion.
Posner: "the elliptical statement of facts which strips away all non-essential detail [...] enables the reader to grasp the situation." He finds it clear and lucid, and that the omission of the stammer was high art: it would have undermined the apparent seriousness of the opinion. And, in truth, the generality of the facts is what makes this a standard by which we can measure other cases, and not just a single fact-based situation.
Maybe this bad outcome was her lawyer's fault: he was the one who chose to go after the RR Co. He should have known what a long shot this was, and that the suit would only prolong her emotional distress and eventual serious debt. He was a sole practicioner, described as "unremarkable," except insofar as he lived to be 97. He was a borderline ambulance-chaser, and didn't invest a lot of time and effort into the case. He initially asked for $50K in the complaint (obviously intending to bargain). The RR Co finds the trial cheap: they have their own counsel, and they also don't want an outcome that goes beyond the case at hand. The lawyer almost certainly made a bad, bad error in not compromising before the appeal.
On the other hand, he was sort of successful: he got a giant jury verdict at trial, it was sustained on appeal, and he only lost at the Court of Appeals by the narrowest possible margin. So in that respect, he got way farther than one might have expected.
OK, back to the law of negligence.
What was missing, in Cardozo's opinion, that prevented recovery? There was no relationship between her and the RR Co, and they owed no duty to her, just as a bystander. This doesn't read like a proximate cause opinion (although it is): he finds that there wasn't even a duty. Before we can speculate about a cause in fact, there must be a duty, and the negligence must have been negligent to the plaintiff. The defendan't doesn't have to foresee the method of damage, but is expected to at least foresee the possibility.
Does she have the right to be protected from dangerous and negligence acts out there? Yes, but not against all sorts of risk. You have to be within the defendant's contemplation. So we're circumscribing duties.
Now the dissent: duty is owed to the entire world. For Andrews, the only issue is whether there's some policy reason for limiting the recovery in this particular case: there's duty, but-for causation, harm. He goes with Polemis: it's immaterial what the tortfeasor foresaw, as long as the consequences are a direct result. Policy reasons would be, e.g., overdeterrence. But the goal is to treat similar situations as proximate cause questions.
Most courts follow the dissent, erring in favor of sending things to the jury, when there's an unforeseen plaintiff. If the elements have been satisfied (duty, breach, but-for, injury), we send the case to the jury. Under Carzodo, the question is for the judge (determining whether there was a duty).
Note that in these days, the railroads were really overcrowded, and the operators had paid employees whose job it was to push people onto the crowded trains.