In Re September 11 Litigation
2003 WL 22077747, 2003 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 15522, 280 F.Supp.2d 279 (2003)
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Rule of Law:
Under traditional tort principles, a defendant's duty of care can extend to injuries resulting from the unprecedented, intentional criminal acts of a third party. The specific manner of the harm need not be foreseeable, as long as the general type of harm was a foreseeable risk that the defendant had a duty to prevent.
Facts:
- On September 11, 2001, terrorists hijacked four commercial airplanes operated by American Airlines and United Airlines.
- The airplanes involved in the Pentagon and Shanksville crashes were Boeing '757' models.
- The hijackers were able to breach security, board the airplanes with weapons, and gain access to the cockpits.
- The hijackers intentionally crashed two of the planes into the North and South Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, which were owned and operated by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and World Trade Center Properties LLC.
- The hijackers crashed a third plane into the Pentagon in Virginia.
- The fourth plane crashed in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
- The crashes and subsequent building collapses resulted in the deaths of thousands of people, including passengers, crew members, and individuals on the ground.
Procedural Posture:
- Survivors of the September 11, 2001 attacks and representatives of those who died filed numerous lawsuits against various defendants.
- Pursuant to the Air Transportation Safety and System Stabilization Act, all lawsuits were consolidated for litigation in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
- The defendants, grouped as 'Aviation Defendants' (airlines and security companies), 'WTC Defendants' (building owners and operators), and Boeing (the aircraft manufacturer), filed motions to dismiss the complaints against them under Fed. R. Civ. P. 12(b)(6).
- The defendants argued primarily that they owed no legal duty to protect the plaintiffs from the unprecedented terrorist attacks and that the terrorists' actions were a superseding cause of the harm.
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Issue:
Under state tort law, does the duty of care owed by airlines, airport security companies, World Trade Center owners, and aircraft manufacturers extend to injuries caused by the intentional criminal acts of terrorists who use hijacked commercial airplanes as weapons?
Opinions:
Majority - Hellerstein, District Judge
Yes, the duty of care owed by these defendants extends to the injuries caused by the terrorists. The court held that the defendants were not entitled to dismissal because they each owed a duty of care to the plaintiffs, and the terrorists' actions were not, as a matter of law, a superseding cause that would sever liability. For the Aviation Defendants, the duty to screen passengers for hijackers existed to protect not only those on the plane but also people on the ground from the foreseeable risk of a plane crash. For the World Trade Center Defendants, their duty as landowners included taking reasonable fire-safety precautions to protect occupants, regardless of the fire's origin, which includes foreseeable criminal acts. For Boeing, the aircraft manufacturer, it was foreseeable that a failure to design a secure cockpit door could lead to a hijacking and a subsequent crash, thereby creating a duty to passengers and ground victims. In each instance, while the precise nature and scale of the terrorist attacks were unprecedented, the general risks—hijacking, building fires, and plane crashes—were foreseeable hazards that the defendants had a duty to mitigate.
Analysis:
This opinion is a foundational decision in the September 11th litigation, establishing that the defendants could not obtain an early dismissal by arguing the attacks were unforeseeable as a matter of law. By applying traditional tort principles of duty and proximate cause to an unprecedented event, the court affirmed that the foreseeability analysis focuses on the general type of risk, not the specific, extraordinary manner in which the harm occurs. This ruling allowed the complex and massive litigation to proceed to discovery, shifting the focus from whether a duty existed to whether the defendants breached that duty and whether any such breach was a substantial cause of the plaintiffs' injuries. It set a significant precedent for how courts handle liability for mass casualty events caused by intentional criminal acts.
