Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2003
Publication Information
1 U. St. Thomas L.J. 713 (2003).
Abstract
Sometimes you can learn something by teaching Torts. In my case it happened with the Palsgraf case and John Noonan did it. When we reached Palsgraf, I always discussed with the class Professor Noonan's analysis in Persons and Masks of the Law.
Mrs. Palsgraf lost as a matter of law in the Court of Appeals, and Chief Judge Cardozo wrote the opinion. Professor Noonan thinks she lost because her humanity was covered by the abstract persona, the mask, of an "unforeseeable plaintiff." He did not accuse Cardozo of misapplying the rule of law he used, but of myopia in selecting the rule that would govern.
I suspect that the first-year law students profited, as I know I did, from Noonan's dramatization of the extent to which abstractionism obscured the reality of Helen Palsgraf. Judge Cardozo could have seen her, not as an abstraction to which no duty was owed by the railroad, but as a ticketed invitee to whom it had a duty to compensate for injuries caused by its instrumentality in the course of its business.
Recommended Citation
Charles E. Rice,
Contraception as a Mask of Personhood,
1 U. St. Thomas L.J. 713 (2003)..
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/law_faculty_scholarship/432