Yearly Archives: 2019

Recovery for Emotional Distress in Tort

Jul 3, 2019 Sandy SteelAdd a Comment

In English law, there is no general duty not to cause reasonably foreseeable mental distress, even if the distress-causing conduct is culpable. Indeed, the same is true in respect of psychiatric harm. What, however, is the recoverability of damages for mental distress that occurs as a result of a tortious wrong to the person who suffers the distress? Suppose, for instance, that A negligently damages B’s property with the result that B suffers foreseeable mental distress. Here, B’s claim is not that A owed a duty of care not to cause reasonably foreseeable mental distress by A’s act. It is that B is entitled to damages for loss consequential upon a violation of B’s right that A not negligently damage B’s property. This is the question skilfully examined in Descheemaeker’s article. He explores the extent to which damages are recoverable for emotional harm, defined as “any unpleasant emotional reaction” (P. 603), suffered as a consequence of rights violation. Interestingly, he concludes that the law is largely consistent with a simple principle: damages for consequential (or “parasitic”) emotional harm are, in principle, recoverable, within the usual limits of causation and remoteness, for the violation of any tort law right.

Descheemaeker begins by considering why this simple principle is not generally explicitly recognised by the law. Compare damages for economic loss. It is approaching trite law that damages may be recovered for economic loss that is consequential upon the violation of a right, even if a person’s economic interest does not serve to generate wide-ranging freestanding rights that others not set back that interest. Yet it seems true, as Descheemaeker says, that most (English) tort lawyers would be considerably more doubtful of the proposition that any reasonably foreseeable emotional harm that results from the violation of right is recoverable in damages.

The article gives two specific explanations for the absence of explicit recognition amongst doctrinal writers. First, Descheemaeker describes a general attitude of suspicion about whether emotional harm is truly “harm” or “loss.” There is a tendency to think that “the concept of loss…[is] restricted…to concrete detriments that are pecuniary, i.e. directly valuable in money (damnum in the historical sense of economic or financial loss).” (P. 605.) He rightly notes the tension between this notion of loss and other well-accepted forms of recoverable loss, such as pain and suffering, and loss of amenity. If the law accepts that pain and suffering can constitute “loss”, is it not required as matter of consistency to accept that the currency of loss extends beyond the pecuniary? It is plausible to think so. One might object that emotional harm is different from pain. Pain is not an emotion. Emotions are belief-mediated, and often judgment-mediated: one’s emotions are directly responsive to one’s beliefs about and evaluations of the world. This seems true, but the point still stands that the law is already deeply committed to extending the concept of loss to comparisons between non-pecuniary states of affairs. Perhaps, however, the belief and judgment-mediated quality of emotional harm has also played a role in emotional harm being viewed with greater suspicion than other forms of harm.

The second explanation is that courts have gone some way to cloaking recovery for consequential emotional harm in terminology that obscures the true nature of the harm in respect of which damages are granted. For example, courts award aggravated damages” in circumstances where the defendant had committed the tort in a high-handed way. The focus here on the defendant’s conduct obscures the fact (reasonably well accepted now) that the loss in respect of which aggravated damages are awarded is the additional mental distress occasioned by the humiliating way in which the wrong was committed. Another example discussed is the Court of Appeal decision in Bryant¹ where trespass by the defendant’s cattle had damaged trees on the claimant’s land. The diminution in value was minimal. The claimants were nonetheless awarded the much greater cost of replacing the trees, the reasonableness of this measure being justified by reference to the claimant’s non-pecuniary interest in the amenity value of their land.

Descheemaeker also claims that awards made for “abstractly-defined loss” indirectly compensate for emotional harm. An abstract definition of loss is adopted where the law switches “from the usual perspective of loss as a concrete detriment flowing from the wrong to the abstract definition of loss as the wrong itself.” (P. 608.) So, for Descheemaeker, damages for loss of privacy, loss of liberty, and loss of autonomy all involve indirect compensation for emotional harm.

This seems open to question, however. In some cases, courts make separate awards for the mere fact of the violation of the right in addition to an award of distress. Furthermore, it is clear that sometimes damages may be awarded in this category of case independently of any distress being suffered at all. If B wrongfully uses A’s property for a certain period, B is liable to pay user damages generally representing the reasonable rent for the use. This is also particularly clear in cases where B wrongfully damages A’s property and A is entitled to damages for the loss of use of the property, in addition to the cost of repair, even if the destruction has occasioned no financial loss, because A already had a replacement ready to stand in for the damaged object. Descheemaeker writes of such cases: “if a chattel is immobilised while being repaired, damages can be claimed for the period of immobilisation even when it is not profit-earning. What detriment is being compensated for here? Clearly it is not a pecuniary loss. This must mean that the relevant concrete detriment is emotional: damages for loss of use are in effect damages for mental distress.” (P. 609.)

This analysis faces two problems. First, it is not clear how Descheemaeker would reconcile this proposition with his later acceptance that de lege lata damages for non-pecuniary loss are not available in cases of juridical persons. (P. 625.) Second, why think that the only options are pecuniary loss or mental distress? On the face of it, a person can suffer a loss which consists neither in their being financially worse off nor being distressed. A person who is deprived of consciousness for a continued period, and is thereby unable to enjoy their life, is worse off than they would be if they were not so deprived. English law recognises this in granting damages for lost amenity to the comatose. It may be that Descheemaeker endorses a kind of hedonism about loss: on this view, one suffers a loss only if one suffers a conscious negative experience. But the law already accepts a non-hedonistic concept of loss. The clearest example is vanilla pecuniary loss: a person can suffer a financial loss while being entirely unaware of it.

Descheemaeker briefly develops an intriguing reply to this sort of objection. He writes that: “damages for emotional harm are not normally for what the specific claimant has suffered: they are standard awards for what an ordinary claimant would have suffered in similar circumstances.” (P. 624.) In the case of an unconscious person, Descheemaeker claims that the law can treat their being unconscious as an “idiosyncrasy” which is discounted from consideration in determining whether they suffered loss. This reasoning, he suggests, could even be extended to juridical persons. It is true that we see evidence of standardisation in the law in determining the loss a person has suffered. If A wrongfully damages B’s car, the fact that C, B’s friend, has repaired the car gratuitously will be ignored in determining B’s damages. C will be entitled to the diminution in value of the object, measured normally by the market rate for cost of repair. Yet there is a sense in which standardisation calls for justification. If the claimant herself is not any worse off, then why is she awarded compensation? In the case of A, B, C, we might say it is because B will feel obligated to compensate C in some way for C’s doing this work. But it is not clear what justification can be given for extending the standardisation of loss to the circumstances Descheemaeker describes (unconsciousness, juridical personality). There is nothing “idiosyncratic” about being a juridical person.

Although we might dispute the idea that the various phenomena adduced to establish the thesis are all reducible to the single notion of emotional harm, Descheemaeker’s analysis, overall, is highly persuasive. He succeeds in making out the case for the existence of an implicit general principle permitting recovery for emotional harm consequential upon a violation of a tortious right in English law. More generally, his article makes a number of interesting observations about the general idea of loss in tort law, in particular concerning the currency of loss, and the standardisation involved in applying the concept of loss. As yet, these issues remain relatively underexplored.

Letting Some Light In: Resolving a Key Question Regarding Communication-and-Resolution Programs

May 24, 2019 Nora Freeman EngstromAdd a Comment

Allen Kachalia and ten co-authors’ new piece, entitled Effects of a Communication-and-Resolution Program on Hospitals’ Malpractice Claims and Costs, offers an insight to address one of the most daunting challenges that looms over the field of tort law—and, indeed, one of the most daunting challenges that confronts the “sister professions” of law and medicine more generally. The question is how to address the problem of preventable medical injury. In human terms, the problem is enormous. Roughly 35 million Americans are hospitalized annually, and the best evidence suggests that approximately 1% of those individuals will be victims of bona fide medical malpractice, while perhaps another 1.3% will be “preventably,” though not necessarily negligently, hurt by the care they receive. That adds up to some 800,000 individuals. Further, while many of these injuries are minor or transient, others are serious. Each year, 44,000 to 98,000 Americans die because of medical mistakes, which means that medical errors may cause more deaths per year than all other accident types, combined.

The medical malpractice system—the civil justice system’s attempt to address the above injuries—also takes a significant toll. The system’s direct cost is substantial: Administrative costs alone (in legal fees and insurer overhead) reportedly top $6 billion annually. Its indirect costs are considerable, as an abiding fear of liability reportedly impacts the tests physicians perform, the medication they prescribe, and the referrals they make, which contributes to “defensive medicine” (which is, itself, costly). And, the physicians who are sued are, by all accounts, deeply, and negatively, affected.

Nor is the situation particularly satisfactory from the injured patients’ perspective. For a host of reasons, only a miniscule fraction of those hurt by medical error (2% to 3%) ever seek compensation, even informally. When injured patients do initiate claims, many fall short: Doctors prevail in roughly three-quarters of medical malpractice jury trials, and, overall, approximately 40% of patients who retain counsel fail to recover a cent. And, even when compensation does come, it comes slowly and is often inadequate, particularly for the grievously hurt.²

Understandably, unsatisfied with all the above, the past four decades have witnessed a flurry of med-mal-related reform activity. Some reforms—damage caps and contingency fee restrictions, most prominently—have been enacted. Yet, these reforms only tinker at the margins, and their social utility is dubious. Other reform ideas—such calls to adopt enterprise liability, a move to base liability on contract, rather than tort, principles, and proposals to jettison the traditional tort system in favor of no-fault regimes or specialized “health courts”—are bolder. But some of these reform ideas have been subject to harsh criticism, and, so far, none has taken root. Indeed, the med mal landscape is so bleak that one scholar has likened it to the “law’s Vietnam—an unpleasant quagmire of unending skirmishes and full-scale engagements” with, I would add, uncertain objectives, raised voices, and pointed fingers, all while the casualties mount.³

Into this quagmire, enters a promising new study undertaken by a large team of many of the field’s most esteemed researchers. Recently published in Health Affairs and entitled Effects of a Communication-and-Resolution Program On Hospitals’ Malpractice Claims and Costs, the study offers a glimmer of good news. It finds that hospitals can disclose certain medical mishaps to patients and even apologize for the harm they inflict, without causing liability costs to skyrocket.

In the study, Allen Kachalia and ten co-authors examine the effect of four Massachusetts hospitals’ communication-and-resolution programs, CRPs for short.⁴ To understand the study, a brief primer on CRPs is necessary.

Fueled by swirling ethical concerns and buttressed by a desire for greater transparency and accountability, over 200 hospitals and health care organizations have adopted CRPs. Programs vary on the specifics, but the general idea is that, if a hospital adopts a CRP, it commits to “communicate with patients about adverse events; investigate and explain what happened; and, when appropriate, apologize, take responsibility, and proactively offer compensation” (P. 1836). The attraction of CRPs is obvious. At least in theory, the programs foster candid dialog between physicians and patients, promote timely investigations into the causes of injury (which might reveal golden opportunities for quality improvement), and, when warranted, offer a streamlined system to ensure fair, efficient, and prompt compensation.

Adoption of CRPs has been stunted, however, by liability concerns. Hospital administrators are well aware of the statistics above—and particularly the fact that, currently, a tiny fraction of those hurt ever seek compensation, even informally. Administrators are understandably concerned that, if their doctors start to confess their mistakes, and particularly if doctors or hospitals proactively offer compensation to those hurt, liability costs will rise, as a higher proportion of injured patients will seek recompense, and those who do will demand ever-higher amounts. But, while this liability concern has loomed large and has dampened some institutions’ interest in adopting CRPs, no one has really known whether the concern was theoretical or real. That’s where Kachalia et al.’s Health Affairs study comes in.

Starting in late 2012, four Massachusetts hospitals implemented a communication-and-resolution program specifically known as CARe (Communication, Apology, and Resolution). Consistent with the general CRP script, under CARe, evidence that a patient has sustained significant harm triggers an internal investigation. If the investigation reveals that the harm was caused by caregiver negligence, the matter is referred to the hospital’s insurer.⁵ Following the insurer’s review, the hospital then convenes a meeting with the patient and his or her family (and their attorney, if desired) to discuss next steps, which may include an explanation or apology, a waiver of medical bills, an offer of compensation, or some combination of the above.

By comparing the liability experience of four hospitals that implemented CARe against control hospitals that didn’t, and also comparing the four hospitals’ pre-CARe liability experience against their experience once CARe was in effect, Kachalia and co-authors assess CARe’s impact. Most prominently, they discover:

Although in theory, routinely offering compensation where negligence causes serious harm should mean that more injuries are compensated, and although the hospitals in our study adhered to the CRP protocol faithfully, total liability cost trends did not worsen, and trends in defense costs and rates of new claims improved.

(P. 1843).

The study is ambitious and rigorous, and its methodology is technologically sophisticated. Its finding, therefore, sheds welcome light on CRPs’ utility. Still, as the researchers forthrightly acknowledge, questions remain.

For starters, Kachalia and co-authors examine—and help to debunk fears regarding—the “cost” side of CRP’s cost-benefit coin. The study suggests that, contrary to the fears of some, the adoption and implementation of a CRP probably won’t cause a hospital’s liability costs to spike. But reforms are, and should be, evaluated based on both costs and benefits, and the benefit side of the ledger needs further elaboration. Some of the questions that must be answered include: Are the benefits believed to be associated with CRPs real? Or are they understated or, alternatively, exaggerated? Further, do these benefits actually accompany CRPs, even when the programs are implemented in messy real-world conditions? This question is important as some research suggests that, once researchers aren’t looking, some organizations’ commitment to CRP may become selective or halfhearted. Some organizations may follow the CRP script some of the time but not all of the time, or they may offer “transparency” but actually, in a given scenario, shade what is or is not revealed. Any lack of fidelity will affect the program’s utility.⁶

In addition to the fidelity question, future researchers must also address what I’ll call the durability question. In particular, researchers must assess whether perceived improvements are lasting or merely ephemeral, and they must also investigate whether, as years go by (and the initial zeal that spurred the reform ebbs), the cost side of the ledger swells. This question is crucial, as Kachalia and co-authors understandably examined only the first four-and-a-half years of CARe’s implementation. Yet, past research evaluating other (admittedly different) tort reform efforts suggests that initial benefits tend to diminish as years go by, while certain costs trend upward.⁷ Only time will tell whether we will see such reversion here, but researchers must be alert to the risk.

Finally, when evaluating both costs and benefits, researchers should examine questions from the perspectives of all who may be affected by the reform effort, including but not limited to past and future patients.  Three categories of questions must be addressed.  First, do injured patients and their families believe the programs are fair, and how does satisfaction compare to claimant satisfaction within the traditional tort system?⁸ Second, are CRP compensation offers prompt, adequate, predictable, consistent, and equitable?⁹  Third and most crucially:  Do CRPs promote or inhibit quality improvement?¹⁰ Do those medical errors that currently injure some 800,000 patients each year tick upward or downward when a CRP is in effect?

Still, the questions above and work that lies ahead do nothing to diminish the importance of Kachalia et al.’s analysis.  In a battlefield that’s long been marked by more heat than light, in their sustained and sober analysis, Kachalia and co-authors are beginning to let some sunlight in.

Rethinking Tort Liability for Suicides

Apr 25, 2019 Mark GeistfeldAdd a Comment

Suicide has become an important public-health problem, leading Alex Long to revisit the unduly neglected question of whether tort law should recognize wrongful-death actions for cases in which the defendant’s tortious conduct caused the victim to commit suicide. After describing the increasingly worrisome trends—suicide is now the tenth leading cause of death in the country—Long insightfully constructs the historical, religious, and sociological motivations embedded in the tort doctrines, labeled the “suicide rule” by one jurisdiction, that ordinarily bar recovery for suicides. “Tort law’s historical treatment of cases involving suicide represents a combination of society’s traditionally negative views regarding suicide and tort law’s traditional concerns with foreseeability and expanding liability in cases involving emotional injury” (P. 16).

Long identifies “a slight trend among court decisions away from singling out suicide cases for special treatment and toward an analytical framework that more closely follows traditional tort law principles” (P. 6). Long defends this approach, drawing on the principles that courts use to formulate the tort duty in cases of pure emotional distress. “Ordinarily, suicide will be outside the foreseeable scope of the defendant’s negligence” and therefore not subject to liability as per the traditional approach (P. 49). But if the plaintiff can prove “that the negligent conduct is especially likely to result in suicide,” courts should permit recovery for the wrongful death. (Id.) Long correctly diagnoses the problem—tort principles do not justify the suicide rule—although these wrongful-death recoveries will be more common than he concludes. The increased liability is fully justified in my view.

Relying on doctrines that originated in English law from the Middle Ages, courts ordinarily dismiss these wrongful-death claims as a matter of law. In nearly every jurisdiction, courts hold that suicide—subject to limited exceptions discussed below—is an unforeseeable consequence of negligence that absolves a defendant of liability for the wrongful death (though not necessarily for the predicate physical or emotional harms that caused the decedent to commit suicide) (P. 17). In addition, “[n]egligence defendants have had some success in asserting that suicide is an immoral or unlawful act and thus bars recovery” (P. 20). Some courts deny recovery for comparative-fault reasons, concluding that suicide “is more than mere contributory negligence and is of a higher culpability level than the defendant’s negligence.”¹¹

Courts recognize exceptions to the suicide rule if “the defendant’s negligence causes injury that results in insanity or delirium in a form that prevents an individual from understanding the nature of his act or that creates an irresistible suicidal impulse” (P. 22). In addition, some defendants (like schools and psychiatrists) may have the very duty to prevent the decedent from committing suicide, in which case the suicide could be foreseeable (Pp. 26-27). Finally, for liabilities based on an intentional tort (typically the intentional infliction of emotional distress), most courts permit recovery if the plaintiff can prove that the tortious conduct was a substantial factor in causing the suicide (P. 32).

Long’s article surfaces a host of interesting issues that cannot be adequately addressed here. I will instead focus on his primary proposal that courts should reject the suicide rule in favor of an approach that only asks whether the defendant’s tortious conduct was especially likely to cause the decedent to commit suicide.

In defending this approach, Long concludes that liability will still be exceptional because “experts with superior knowledge regarding suicide have been unable to develop a reliable method for determining those at high risk of suicide,” and so “the hypothetical reasonable person will ordinarily not be able to do better” (P. 37). The question, however, is not whether one can reliably identify whether a particular person will commit suicide. A negligent actor is liable for the foreseeable risks that cause compensable injury, and a foreseeable risk does not require knowledge of whether it will actually materialize in a particular case. A defendant, for example, can incur liability to cancer victims for having negligently exposed them to carcinogens, but at the time of the tortious behavior there ordinarily is no way to reliably determine which exposures will ultimately cause cancer.

The prevalence of suicide today often makes that type of harm foreseeable for reasons fully established by Long. By causing chronically severe pain or emotional distress, the defendant’s tortious conduct substantially increases the likelihood of suicide. “The reality is that the most common description of the mental state of those who have committed suicide is that they did not want to die; they just wanted the pain they were experiencing to stop, a seemingly rational decision to a person who otherwise sees no realistic end to the pain he or she is suffering” (Pp. 45-46). To be sure, the decedent’s reasoning may have been impaired, but under the majority rule “the plaintiff’s contributory negligence must be evaluated by using a subjective standard that takes into account the plaintiff’s own mental state, including any mental impairments” (P. 56, n. 368). Insofar as a victim’s chronic pain and the associated mental state significantly increase the likelihood of suicide, those factors make the suicide a foreseeable consequence of the defendant’s negligence.

To recover, the plaintiff must also prove that the defendant’s negligent conduct actually caused the decedent to commit suicide—the same inquiry that courts employ for determining the liability of intentional tortfeasors. “In practice, the substantial factor standard [for establishing causation] has not proven to be a particularly onerous requirement for plaintiffs” (P. 32). The same should be true for negligent tortfeasors.

Consider cases in which the proof already shows that the defendant’s negligence caused the decedent to suffer severe bodily injury with the associated pain and emotional distress that then allegedly caused the decedent to commit suicide. At this point, the plaintiff has established liability and an entitlement to compensatory damages for the predicate bodily injury. The causal problem accordingly reduces to the question of whether the negligence caused the full extent of the injuries alleged by the plaintiff—the wrongful-death damages for the suicideallegedly caused by the predicate (compensable) bodily injury. The evidentiary standard for establishing causation in the damages phase of the case is less demanding than in the liability phase. Instead of having to prove causation by a preponderance of the evidence, the plaintiff is only required to prove “the extent of the [tortiously caused] harm with as much certainty as the nature of the tort and the circumstances permit.”¹² After the fact, we will not ordinarily know why someone took his or her life. That inherent uncertainty, however, should not bar recovery when the reasonably available evidence shows that the defendant’s negligence substantially increased the risk of suicide. For these reasons, the substantial factor standard has not been particularly onerous for plaintiffs seeking to recover from intentional tortfeasors; those reasons apply with equal force to negligent actors.¹³

The foregoing analysis does not imply that the decedent necessarily bears no responsibility for taking his or her life. Such a determination is relevant to the apportionment of liability under comparative responsibility; it is not a sufficient reason to deny liability altogetherunder the suicide rule.

Established tort principles, therefore, support Long’s conclusion that courts should abolish the antiquated doctrines that limit liability for suicides. By demonstrating that the persistence of the suicide rule stems from the stigma and immorality that traditional conventions ascribe to these desperate acts, Long has made a valuable contribution to our understanding of tort law.

Cardozo’s Great Proximate Cause Decision?

Mar 28, 2019 Benjamin C. ZipurskyAdd a Comment

Featuring the memorable phrase “Danger invites rescue,” Cardozo’s opinion in Wagner v. International Railway Co. is engaging and beautifully written. The same can be said of Recovering Wagner v. International Railway Company (hereinafter “Recovering Wagner”)─the recent study of Wagner by Ken Abraham and Ted White (hereinafter “AW”). Through historical research principally into the litigation of the case, they generate an important new interpretation of Wagner. According to AW, Wagner forced Cardozo to confront what lawyers then and now would call a “proximate cause” question. Yet his opinion does not explicitly mention proximate cause (or duty, for that matter). Instead, it employs a notion of relationality of risk. Indeed, AW powerfully argue, the whole point of Wagner is that relationality of risk is far more important than the idea of a “natural and probable” sequence from breach to injury, or any kind of remoteness criterion, in determining whether a defendant should be held responsible in negligence for a plaintiff’s injury. Their larger point is that Wagner can be seen to encapsulate Cardozo’s powerful influence on American negligence law.

Abraham and White’s research confirms that Cardozo’s depiction of the facts in Wagner is largely accurate. I follow their judgment that quoting Cardozo’s account is the best way to re-acquaint readers with the facts of the case:

The defendant operates an electric railway between Buffalo and Niagara Falls. There is a point on its line where an overhead crossing carries its tracks above those of the New York Central and the Erie. A gradual incline upwards over a trestle raises the tracks to a height of twenty-five feet . . . Then comes a turn to the right at about the same angle down the same kind of an incline to grade. Above the trestles, the tracks are laid on ties, unguarded at the ends . . . On the bridge, a narrow footpath runs between the tracks . . . .

Plaintiff [Arthur Wagner] and his cousin Herbert [Wagner] boarded a car at a station near the bottom of one of the trestles . . . The platform was provided with doors, but the conductor did not close them. Moving at from six to eight miles an hour, the car, without slackening, turned the curve. There was a violent lurch, and Herbert Wagner was thrown out, near the point where the trestle changes to a bridge . . . Plaintiff walked along the trestle, a distance of four hundred and forty-five feet, until he arrived at the bridge, where he thought to find his cousin’s body . . . Reaching the bridge, he had found upon a beam his cousin’s hat, but nothing else. About him, there was darkness. He missed his footing, and fell (P. 437).

Wagner holds that a person injured while trying to rescue a person who was imperiled by the defendant’s negligence may himself recover from the negligent defendant. “Danger invites rescue” is widely understood to express the rule that, because it is foreseeable that someone will try to rescue another engulfed in a danger that the defendant negligently created, the defendant is liable to the rescuer if he is injured during the rescue attempt. AW are not especially concerned to contest this reading. Their thesis is that when we understand how the case was litigated at trial, and the precedents on which the case was decided, we learn a great deal about how Cardozo understood the basis of the defendant’s responsibility.

On first blush, Wagner actually looked easy for the plaintiff on the law but difficult on the facts. On the law, it looked easy because the New York Court of Appeals had already prominently decided that a rescuer had a claim against the source of the unreasonable risk imperiling the original victim. A key case was Eckert v. Long Island R.R., but there were other applicable precedents too, both from New York and elsewhere. The actual facts of this case made it more difficult for the plaintiff. First, the plaintiff Arthur Wagner may well have been drunk. Second, his cousin was rescued by others, and the plaintiff was not even looking in the right place when he was injured. Third, and in many ways most importantly, the act of going to rescue his cousin was not an impulsive leaping to aid (as in Eckert), but a deliberate decision about how and where to look. Relatedly, there was a controversy at trial regarding whether Arthur was accompanied by (or perhaps led by) an employee of the defendant.

The Railroad was understandably eager not to depend exclusively on the (then-complete) defense of contributory negligence, as it was simply unclear what a jury would find on that front. AW show how the Railroad’s lawyer, Edward Franchot, managed to use the aforementioned peculiarities of the fact pattern to generate another argument against liability (Pp. 36-39). Specifically, he persuaded the trial judge to instruct the jury that the alleged negligence of the Railroad in going around the bend and overpacking its train – the alleged negligence that caused Arthur’s cousin Herbert to fall in the first place – could not be the basis of Arthur’s action. Rather, the judge instructed the jury that Arthur could recover only a finding that the conductor had negligently instructed Arthur going on the trestle. This left the jury to weigh the conductor’s testimony and Arthur’s testimony with regard to what was said and done during the panicky moments following Herbert’s fall. Arthur’s testimony was evidently less credible to the jury than the conductor’s, so the Railroad won the case.

On appeal, Arthur’s lawyer, argued quite plausibly that the New York Court of Appeals’ own leading precedent – Gibney v. State – permitted liability to be predicated on the negligence of the railroad that led to Herbert’s need for rescue. Franchot distinguished Gibney by arguing that that the rescuer’s conduct in that case was an instinctive reaction, whereas in Wagner the attempted rescue was a deliberate act. The instinctiveness of the rescue in Gibney permitted the continuity between breach and injury that allowed a finding of proximate cause. Given the absence of comparable continuity in Wagner, Franchot argued that the railroad’s original negligence was not the proximate cause of Herbert’s rescue attempt. The judge’s instructions to the jury were therefore correct.

In his opinion for the Court of Appeals, Cardozo confronted this argument head on, pointedly rejecting it:

The defendant says that we must stop, in following the chain of causes, when action ceases to be ‘instinctive.’ By this is meant, it seems, that rescue is at the peril of the rescuer, unless spontaneous and immediate. If there has been time to deliberate, if impulse has given way to judgment, one cause, it is said, has spent its force, and another has intervened . . . We find no warrant for thus shortening the chain of jural causes. We may assume, though we are not required to decide, that peril and rescue must be in substance one transaction; that the sight of the one must have aroused the impulse to the other; in short, that there must be unbroken continuity between the commission of the wrong and the effort to avert its consequences. If all this be assumed, the defendant is not aided. Continuity in such circumstances is not broken by the exercise of volition . . . The law does not discriminate between the rescuer oblivious of peril and the one who counts the cost. It is enough that the act, whether impulsive or deliberate, is the child of the occasion (P. 438).

Cardozo’s opinion thus abandons the notion that a deliberate act inserted into the causal chain destroys the possibility of liability. Notably, while he does not use the phrase “proximate cause” or “legal cause,” he does indeed use the phrase “the chain of jural causes,” and he rejects the idea of shortening this chain because of intervening volitional action.

More generally, Cardozo embraces a risk-based notion of the connection between the injury and the underlying risk-creating action:

The wrong that imperils life is a wrong to the imperiled victim; it is a wrong also to his rescuer. The state that leaves an opening in a bridge is liable to the child that falls into the stream, but liable also to the parent who plunges to its aid (citing Gibney). The railroad company whose train approaches without signal is a wrongdoer toward the traveler surprised between the rails, but a wrongdoer also to the bystander who drags him from the path . . . The risk of rescue, if only it be not wanton, is born of the occasion. The emergency begets the man (Pp. 437-38).

AW’s article explains that Cardozo was, in effect, supplanting what was at the time the dominant way in which New York courts (and other courts) had formulated the proximate cause requirement: namely, whether the defendant’s carelessness had led to the plaintiff’s injury through a “natural and probable” sequence. Now the question is whether the injury complained of by the plaintiff was an actualization or realization of the risk negligently taken by the defendant (P. 57).

Abraham and White’s reading of Wagner as having effected a tacit change in proximate cause law also supports a longstanding Twentieth Century reading of another Cardozo opinion – that of Harvard Professor Warren Seavey¹⁴ in Palsgraf v. Long Island R.R. Seavey saw Palsgraf as a proximate cause case that hinged on Cardozo’s quiet substitution of a risk-rule conception of proximate cause for the prevailing natural-and-probable-sequence conception. What rendered “negligent” the LIRR guard’s pushing of the passenger was the risk of destroying the passenger’s package, not the risk of physically injuring a woman down the platform, Seavey observed. Liability in negligence requires a match between the risk and the injury. In Wagner, the risk of a rescuer’s injury is part of what made the Railroad negligent, so a plaintiff who suffered the realization of that risk has  a claim based on the Railroad’s negligent conduct in rounding the bend with open doors.

Once they have drawn the connection with Seavey’s Palsgraf reading, AW arrive at their most striking scholarly claim: “We think the decision in Wagner contains virtually everything necessary to its more celebrated offspring, Palsgraf” (P. 56). They proceed to list these necessary ingredients: “the centrality of risk-analysis to questions involving what others had analyzed in terms of proximate cause”; “the causal-chain analysis that Judge Andrews would later employ in his Palsgraf dissent”; and the willingness to classify as a “matter of law” the question of which risks are associated with a defendant’s negligence. “In a very real sense,” they conclude, “it isWagner, not Palsgraf that is Cardozo’s seminal decision in this area of tort law” (P. 58). AW will not be surprised that I (a self-described Palsgraf maven) would wholeheartedly reject this particular conclusion, but that is a matter for another time; I concede that their case for Wagner as a Palsgraf preview is nicely laid out.

There are numerous reasons to regard AW’s article as essential reading for Torts professors. Among these are the article’s erudition and its reminder of the importance of detail in the analysis of canonical cases. There is also its recognition that relationality of risk can be (as it was in Wagner) a sword, and not just a shield (as it was in Palsgraf). Most importantly, AW’s “recovery” of Wagner flags for all of us the important historical truth that proximate cause analyses were once very different than they are today. Foreseeability and relationality of risk played a lesser role, while “natural and probable” and “directness” played a greater role. In this vein, we should remember that courts were not always comfortable including within causal chains the voluntary conduct of the plaintiff or of third parties. Unforeseeable wrongful conduct today may sever liability via the doctrine of superseding cause, but for a large part of the 20th century, a far broader range of voluntary conduct would have severed liability via proximate cause. In this former world, we would not have seen Tarasoff v. Regents of the University of California, or Kline v. 1500 Mass. Ave. Those progressive duty cases were arguably only possible because a relationality if risk conception of “jural cause” replaced a more mechanistic and naturalistic one. Seen through the prism of AW’s analysis, it was partly Cardozo’s achievement in Wagner that made this possible.

Can Damage Calculations in Tort Cases be Unconstitutional Because They Discriminate on the Basis of Race? Yes, and Here’s Why.

Feb 20, 2019 Jennifer WrigginsAdd a Comment

In basic tort damage doctrine, a person injured by a tort can recover lost wages. This means it costs less to harm some people than others. People who earn less, whether because of reduced educational opportunities, racism, geography, family responsibilities, or other factors, will suffer lower damages than people who earn more. Defendants (and insurance companies) will have to pay less to “make them whole.” This aspect of tort damages is in tension with, if not in contradiction to, the notion that—formally—everyone counts equally in torts. This tension rarely gets attention or critique, in part because tort damages are determined individually, usually through informal and private settlements

In one context of U.S. tort law, however, the relationship between damages and inequality is on the surface and subject to critique. When an injured individual lacks an earnings history, race-based statistical tables estimating wages, life expectancy, and work-life expectancy are still routinely used in calculating tort damage awards. African-American plaintiffs, as a result, receive lower damage awards than white plaintiffs in such circumstances. Many people are surprised to hear this practice endures, although scholars have criticized it for decades.¹⁵ Valuing Black Lives is the most detailed explanation yet published as to why the use of race-based tables in calculating tort damages is unconstitutional. It is a companion piece to the authors’ previous article, Torts and Discrimination, earlier reviewed in Jotwell.¹⁶ Valuing Black Lives is excellent. In this era of resurgent racism, it is also particularly timely.

A key question in tort damages, especially where a child is grievously injured, is how much the child would have earned if she had not been hurt. This question is particularly challenging because the child obviously does not have a personal earning history that could be used to estimate lost future earnings. Courts and experts often use race-based and gender-based tables to calculate future lost wages in such a situation. Yuracko and Avraham argue that the use of race-based tables to calculate damages disadvantages individuals and creates incentives for companies to disproportionately allocate risks to minority communities so as to minimize tort damages. They claim, for example, that it would be economically rational for a large delivery company to concentrate its routes and its risky drivers in African-American neighborhoods because the company would end up paying lower damages as a result. As they note, the use of tables ‘embeds effects of racial discrimination into individual tort awards and channels past levels of racial discrimination into predictions about the future.’ The authors painstakingly and persuasively argue that race-based tables are racial classifications when used in court. Further, tables ‘stereotype individuals and make predictions about individual preferences and proclivities based on group membership,’ much like racial profiles. Because tables operate as race-based classifications, their use will be subject to strict scrutiny as long as state action is present. Based on a detailed discussion of state action doctrine, the authors methodically show how judicial reliance on race-based tables to calculate tort damages constitutes state action. Then they carefully apply strict scrutiny and conclude use of the tables doesn’t pass muster. They close by highlighting important aspects of tort damages calculations that will not be remedied by simply discarding race-based tables. As noted above, an injured person whose education and employment opportunities have been stunted by racism will have lower lost wages than a more privileged, higher earning person who suffers a similar injury.Inequality rooted in race and privilege pervades our torts damage calculation regime. The authors provide no solution to this deeper problem; I hope they write an additional article which focuses on that topic. I also hope they focus on gender-based tables which are also still used but are not discussed in Valuing Black Lives (perhaps because of the different standard of review). Their analysis provides a strong and detailed foundation for a court to hold that use of race-based tables to determine tort damages is unconstitutional.

The article and the earlier Torts and Discrimination join a growing literature on race and torts. This literature goes beyond targeting use of race-based tables which is perhaps the only remaining overt use of race on the surface of tort litigation. Up until the 1960s judges generally mentioned the race of tort litigants if they were not white; there are hundreds of published tort opinions dealing directly or indirectly with race to which few torts scholars have paid attention.¹⁷ Now that race is absent from the surface of tort opinions, the topic is even harder hard to study. A race-based discount was clear from older opinions.¹⁸ Race-based devaluation probably persists in many contexts, such as settlement, that are exceedingly difficult to study. A fascinating empirical analysis published in 2016 argues that the failure of some Southern states to adopt reforms such as comparative negligence can be traced to race and geography rather than explanations such as economics.¹⁹ A recent international comparative analysis shows that the use of race-based and gender-based tables is neither universal nor inevitable.²⁰ There is more work to do.

It is or should be widely seen as extremely objectionable that race-based tables are still used in tort litigation and the authors’ concentrated attention to this issue is welcome. Other aspects of race, racism and torts deserve more attention than they have received. It’s high time outstanding work like this gets center stage.