The Court of Appeals has decided some of the most important cases in American jurisprudence.
Conflict of laws •
Babcock v. Jackson (
Fuld, J.): holding that the law of the jurisdiction governs that has the strongest interest in the resolution of the particular issue presented.
Statutory interpretation •
Riggs v. Palmer (
Earl, J): used the "
social purpose" rule of
statutory construction, the process of interpreting a will.
Contracts •
Wood v. Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon (
Cardozo, J.): was both a minor
cause célèbre at the time and an influential development in the law of contract
consideration. •
Jacob & Youngs v. Kent (Cardozo, J.): held that expectation damages arising from a breach of contract are limited to the diminution of the property's value if the undoing of the breach was an economic waste. •
Boomer v. Atlantic Cement Co. (
Bergan, J.): the court granted an injunction against the cement plant for nuisance, but permitted the plant to pay permanent damages after which the court would vacate the injunction. In essence, the court permitted the plant to pay the net present value of its effects and to continue polluting.
Corporations •
Berkey v. Third Avenue Railway Co (Cardozo, J.): held that the Third Avenue Railway Co was not liable for the debts of the subsidiary. It was necessary that the domination of the parent company over the subsidiary was required to be complete, in order for the parent company to be treated as liable for the debts of the subsidiary. It was needed that the subsidiary be merely the alter ego of the parent, or that the subsidiary be thinly capitalized, so as to perpetrate a fraud on the creditors. •
Meinhard v. Salmon (Cardozo, J.): held that managing partner in a joint venture had a fiduciary duty to inform the investing partner of an opportunity that would arise after the scheduled termination of the partnership. •
Walkovszky v. Carlton (
Fuld, J.): refused to pierce the veil on account of undercapitalization alone.
Criminal law •
People v. Molineux (
Werner, J.): held that using 'evidence' of an unproven previous act of murder against the defendant in a subsequent unrelated trial violated the basic tenet of presumption of innocence, and, therefore, such evidence was inadmissible •
People v. Onofre (
Jones): held that it is not the function of the penal law to provide for the enforcement of moral or theological values. •
People v. Antommarchi (
Simons, J.): affirming the statutory rights of a defendant to be present during any sidebar questioning of a prospective juror concerning his or her impartiality. •
People v. Goetz (
Wachtler, CJ): held that 1) The defense of justification, which permits the use of deadly physical force, is not a purely subjective standard; the actor must not only have the subjective belief that deadly physical force is necessary, but those beliefs must also be objectively reasonable. 2) The mere appearance of perjured testimony given before the Grand Jury is not sufficient to sustain a dismissal of an indictment. •
People v. Scott (Hancock, J.), held that the protections against unlawful search and seizure in the state constitution are broad enough that, contrary to the
open-fields doctrine affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in
Oliver v. United States, a landowner can assert a
reasonable expectation of privacy against a
warrantless search of
all property, not just that within the
curtilage of the house, as long as they have made some effort to exclude the public such as posting or fencing the property or gating roads. New York is one of five states where courts have declined to adopt the doctrine. •
People v. LaValle (
G.B Smith, J.): The current statute of capital punishment in the state of New York was unconstitutional as it violated article one, section six of the state constitution.
Torts •
Devlin v. Smith: The Court held that a duty to third parties "exists when a defect is such as to render the article in itself imminently dangerous, and serious injury to any person using it is a natural and probable consequence of its use." The Court further held that scaffolding to be used in the painting of a courthouse was an inherently dangerous article. •
Schloendorff v. Society of New York Hospital (Cardozo, J.): established principles of informed consent and respondeat superior in United States law •
MacPherson v. Buick Motor Co. (Cardozo, J.): helped signal the end of the law's attachment with
privity as a source of duty in
products liability. This is the foundational doctrine underlying nearly all modern
product liability lawsuits. •
Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad Co. (Cardozo, J.): was important in the development of the concept of the
proximate cause in tort law. •
Martin v. Herzog (Cardozo, J.): holding that the unexcused violation of a statutory duty is
negligence per se and a jury does not have the power to relax the duty that one traveler on the highway owes under a statute to another on the same highway. •
Chysky v. Drake Bros. Co. (
McLaughlin, J.): The Court held that a plaintiff cannot recover from a defendant based on implied warranty when she does not have contractual privity with him; thus, a plaintiff cannot recover from a defendant who sold her employer food unfit for consumption, because the defendant's implied warranty extended only to the employer. •
Tedla v. Ellman (
Lehman, J.): the court held that because the violation occurred in a situation not anticipated by the drafters of the statute and was in keeping with the spirit of the statute, it did not constitute negligence. •
Akins v. Glens Falls City School District (
Jasen, J.): The Court held that the
Baseball Rule, an exception to tort law under which spectators at sporting events cannot hold teams, players or venues liable if they are injured by a ball leaving the field as long as some protected seating was available, is still valid under
comparative negligence, the first time it was challenged under that doctrine. •
Trimarco v. Klein (
Fuchsberg, J.): held that custom and usage is highly relevant evidence related to the reasonable person standard but it does not per se define the scope of negligence. ==See also==