ABSTRACT
Courts reach these results even where the defendant acted tortiously, the plaintiff suffered a real injury, and the plaintiff's injury was reasonably foreseeable. In Palsgraf, a conductor for the defendant railroad negligently pushed a passenger scrambling to get onto a moving train. The negligent push caused a wrapped package to fall to the ground on the station platform. As it turned out, the package contained fireworks, which exploded and caused a scale to fall at the other end of the platform. A plaintiff who is injured by a defamatory statement cannot recover unless she herself was defamed. Courts articulate this point by saying that the defamatory statement must be "of and concerning" the plaintiff. A plaintiff may be injured as a foreseeable result of intentional, fraudulent conduct, but that is not enough to recover in fraud. Nor is it sufficient that someone else may have relied on the fraudulent statement.
