Judge Dismisses 9/11 Lawsuit Over United Airlines Security Lapse

This wasn’t a lawsuit about the Twin Towers or the hijacked planes. This was a lawsuit about an airport security checkpoint in Portland, Ore., and the building next to the towers.

According to Reuters, the owners of 7 World Trade Center were suing United Airlines over the loss of the building, which collapsed after debris from the collision between American Airlines Flight 11 and 1 World Trade Center fell on the neighboring building.

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What does United Airlines have to do with it? United ran a security checkpoint at the Portland airport. Two of the hijackers went through that checkpoint before boarding a plane to Boston. They then went through another checkpoint and boarded one of the flights that was hijacked and crashed into the Twin Towers.

That’s a pretty long chain of causation, which seems to have been the fatal flaw for the lawsuit’s legal claims. The judge dismissed the claims against United Airlines earlier today, stating that United could not have foreseen the chain of events that led to the building’s collapse.

In any negligence claim, the plaintiff must prove causation. A caused B. What’s so hard about that?

There are two elements to causation in a legal claim: “but for” causation and proximate causation. The “but for” argument is that had it not been for United’s allegedly substandard conduct at the checkpoint, the hijackings would not have occurred.

The second “proximate cause” argument is much more difficult to make here. A person is only liable for the reasonably foreseeable consequences of their actions. For example, if a guy throws a rock out of a window and it hits someone, he’d be liable for that. But if it landed in the snow, rolled down the hill, turned into a massive snowball, collided with a tanker truck, and the tanker truck exploded and burned down a village, he (probably) wouldn’t be liable for the damaged buildings.

United isn’t completely off the hook yet, however. A separate claim that addresses the other hijacked plane, United Flight 175, is still pending.

Related Resources:

• Consult a New York Personal Injury Attorney (FindLaw)
• NY judge rejects 9/11 suit against United Airlines (The Associated Press)
• Elements of a Negligence Case (FindLaw’s Learn About the Law)
• What’s the Deal With That $6 Billion 9/11 Verdict? (FindLaw’s New York Personal Injury Law Blog)