customers. Presiding Justice Edward Lazansky (joined by Justice J. Addison Young) wrote a dissent. Lazansky, the son of Czech immigrants, had been elected New York Secretary of State as a Democrat in 1910. Elected to the Supreme Court in 1917, he had been designated presiding justice of the Second Department by Governor Smith earlier in 1927. Lazansky did not question the jury finding of negligence, but felt that the employees' conduct was not the proximate cause of Palsgraf's injuries, since the man's conduct in bringing a package that might explode to a crowded passenger station was an independent act of negligence, rendering the neglect by the railroad too remote in causation for there to be liability. Court of Appeals The LIRR was entitled by law to take the case to the New York Court of Appeals (the state's highest court) as there had been a dissent in the Appellate Division, and it did. The railroad argued again that Palsgraf had failed to establish that she had come to harm through the railroad's negligence: that there was no negligence, and even if there was, that neglect had not harmed Palsgraf, since such injury was not "a natural and probable consequence of assisting a man to board a train". Its brief alleged that the trainmen could not have stopped the man from boarding, and once he had flung himself onto the train, had little choice but to help him, "faced with such an emergency they cannot be charged with negligence because they elected to assist the man rather than stand idly by and leave him to his fate." Wood, for his part, argued that negligence had been found by the jury, and by both majority and dissenting justices in the Appellate Division. He wrote that there were many facts from which the jury could have found negligence, including the fact that the train had not shut its doors as it departed (though whether this was to allow latecomers to board or because it was a summer day is uncertain). The case was argued before the Court of Appeals in Albany on February 24, 1928. Cardozo's majority opinion The Chief Judge of the Court of Appeals, Benjamin N. Cardozo, was a judge who was greatly respected; he later became a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. After a standout legal career, Cardozo had been elected to the trial-level Supreme Court in 1913, but