Opinion ID: 721489
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Reasonable Foreseeability of Harm to the Persons Injured

Text: 40 In determining the existence of a duty, a court may examine the reasonable foreseeability of harm to the party injured. MEA argues that this erroneously conflates the concepts of duty and foreseeability. What MEA fails to recognize, however, is that there are two concepts of foreseeability, the one specific, the other general. The first concerns the foreseeability of the specific injury the plaintiff suffered, and focuses on whether the defendant's actions are a proximate cause of the harm. The second, and the one at issue here, concerns the general foreseeable risk which is crucial to determining the existence of a duty and helps to limit its scope. 41 In the second, or risk-defining sense, Judge Cardozo early recognized, [t]he risk reasonably to be perceived defines the duty to be obeyed, and risk imports relation; it is risk to another or to others within the range of apprehension. Palsgraf v. Long Island R.R. Co., 248 N.Y. 339, 344, 162 N.E. 99, 100 (1928); see also Campbell v. Cunningham Natural Gas Corp., 164 Misc. 1, 298 N.Y.S. 200, 204 (Sup.Ct.1937) (existence of a duty depends on whether the risk to be guarded against is one which would normally be anticipated or foreseen); 65 C.J.S. Negligence §§ 4(1) & 4(3). Hence, 42 [t]he duty element of negligence focuses on whether the defendant's conduct foreseeably created a broader zone of risk that poses a general threat of harm to others.... The proximate causation element, on the other hand, is concerned with whether and to what extent the defendant's conduct foreseeably and substantially caused the specific injury that actually occurred.... As to duty, the proper inquiry for the reviewing appellate court is whether the defendant's conduct created a foreseeable zone of risk, not whether the defendant could foresee the specific injury that actually occurred. 43 McCain v. Florida Power Corp., 593 So.2d 500, 502-04 (Fla.1992) (emphasis added). 44 There was evidence that MEA knew: (1) of the threatened attacks by Hezbollah terrorists; (2) that terrorists were boarding flights in dirty airports to infiltrate other airlines; (3) that the Beirut airport had extraordinarily poor security; and (4) that the four hijackers who boarded in Beirut had tickets which teemed with suspicion. A jury could reasonably find, under these circumstances, that if MEA did nothing, it would create a zone of risk that stretched at least as far as the innocent passengers aboard flights with which the four hijackers would eventually connect. It lay well within ordinary prudence for an airline to realize that persons at the dirty Beirut airport who purchased tickets on short notice with cash, checked no luggage for a flight from the Middle East to the Far East, and took a circuitous route aboard flights which (a) they did not have to take to reach their destination, (b) created inordinate delays and layovers, and (c) no other passenger aboard MEA flight 426 took, posed a hijacking threat. 45 In sum, the duty is dictated and measured by the exigencies of the situation, and the risk reasonably to be perceived defines the duty to be obeyed. 65 C.J.S. Negligence § 4(2). We conclude that MEA, as a first leg interline carrier, had a duty to protect passengers on other interline connecting flights from unreasonable risk of harm through the use of reasonable precautions in the face of reasonably foreseeable risks. MEA was faced with a set of circumstances that a jury could reasonably find created a foreseeable risk, necessitating some action to protect others from an unreasonable threat of hijacking.