was not required that she show that the duty owed was to her. Under New York precedent, the usual duty of utmost care that the railroad as a common carrier owed its customers did not apply to platforms and other parts of the station. Facts Sunday, August 24, 1924, was a warm summer day in Brooklyn, and Helen Palsgraf, a 40-year-old janitor and housekeeper, was taking her two daughters, Elizabeth and Lillian, aged 15 and 12, to Rockaway Beach. Having paid the necessary fare, they were on the platform at the East New York station of the LIRR on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, when a train, not theirs, pulled in. As it began to move again, two men raced for the train, and one made it without incident, as the doors had not closed. The other, a man carrying a package, leapt aboard, with the help of a platform guard pushing him from behind as a member of the train's crew pulled him into the car. But in the process, the man lost the package, which dropped and exploded, for it apparently contained fireworks. Either the force of the explosion or the panicking of those on the platform caused a tall, coin-operated scale to topple onto Helen Palsgraf. No one was hurt enough to spend the night in the hospital, though several people, Palsgraf among them, were listed as injured. Contemporaneous accounts and witnesses at trial described the man as Italian in appearance, and there was speculation that the package was being taken for use at an Italian-American celebration of some sort; no great effort was made to identify the owner. Palsgraf's injury was listed in The New York Times as shock; she also suffered bruising. The distance between Helen Palsgraf and the explosion was never made clear in the trial transcript, or in the opinions of the judges who ruled on the case, but the distance from the explosion to the scale was described in the Times as "more than ten feet away" (3 metres). Several days after the incident, she developed a bad stammer, and her doctor testified at trial that it was due to the trauma of the events at East New York station. She had not recovered from the stammer when the case came to court. Trial Palsgraf brought suit against the railroad in the Supreme Court of New York, Kings County, a trial-level court, in