## Facts

- During World War II, the New York State War Emergency Act made it an infraction to violate rules requiring the screening or extinguishing of lights during blackouts.
- Herlim Realty Corp. owned, managed, and controlled an apartment house in New York City.
- In the early morning hours, a blackout was ordered.
- The apartment house’s lobby/hallway lights were burning and were not screened or otherwise blocked from being visible from outside.
- David Klein, a volunteer air-raid warden, entered the building as part of his duties to enforce blackout lighting restrictions and to ask why the lights were on.
- Two other wardens were in the hallway with Klein; they tried, but failed, to rouse the building superintendent.
- No accessible light switch was found to turn off the lights.
- To stop the blackout violation, the wardens lifted Klein so he could unscrew the light bulbs.
- Once the bulbs were removed, the lobby became totally dark.
- The wardens then lowered Klein; in the darkness, Klein missed his step, fell, and broke his ankle.
- Klein sued Herlim Realty Corp., claiming the building’s statutory violation set in motion a chain of events that led to his injury and that the accident would not have occurred if Herlim had complied with the blackout rules.

## Issues

1. Whether Herlim Realty Corp.’s alleged violation of blackout lighting regulations was a proximate cause of Klein’s fall and resulting injury.
2. Whether the defendant’s conduct was actionable negligence when the injury occurred only after the wardens chose a method of enforcement that created total darkness.

## Decision

- The Supreme Court of New York, New York County (Botein, J.), entered judgment for the defendant.
- Even if leaving the lights burning during the blackout was negligent and unlawful, that violation was not the legal cause of Klein’s injury.
- The statutory violation merely furnished the occasion for the wardens’ enforcement activity; it did not set in motion the immediate agency that produced the harm.
- The wardens’ decision to remove the bulbs, and the resulting total darkness during Klein’s descent, broke the causal connection between the blackout violation and the injury.

## Legal Principles

- A defendant is liable in negligence only when the defendant’s breach is a proximate cause of the plaintiff’s injury, not when it merely creates a circumstance in which an injury later occurs.
- “But-for” causation is not enough; proximate cause requires a sufficiently direct connection between the wrong and the injury.
- A statutory or regulatory violation does not automatically establish civil liability; the plaintiff must still show that the violation legally caused the particular injury.
- When independent acts supply the immediate instrumentality of harm, the original wrongdoing may be treated as too remote to support liability, even if it explains why the parties were at the scene.
- In assessing causation tied to a statute, courts consider whether the injury is of the type the statute was meant to guard against.

## Conclusion

The court denied Klein recovery because, although the building’s lights may have violated blackout rules, that violation only brought the wardens to the premises and did not directly cause the fall; the injury resulted from the wardens’ own method of shutting off the lights—unscrewing bulbs and then lowering Klein in total darkness—making the statutory breach an antecedent condition rather than a proximate cause.


Klein v. Herlim Realty Corp., 54 N.Y.S.2d 144, 184 Misc. 852 (1945)