Private Law Theory

ABSTRACT
At the turn of the twentieth century, state courts were roiled by claims against telegraph corporations for mental anguish resulting from the failure to deliver telegrams involving the death or injury of a family member. Although these ‘telegraph cases’ at first may seem a bizarre outlier, they in fact reveal an important and understudied moment of transformation in the nature of the relationship between the corporation and the public: the role of affective relations in the development of the public utility corporation. Even as powerful corporations were recast as private, rights-bearing, profit-making market actors in constitutional law, a significant minority of rural state courts deviated from the common law to impose liability for mental anguish on negligent telegraph corporations. They did so on the basis that telegraph companies bore an affirmative duty to protect the emotional well-being and family connections of their customers. In this, courts gave voice to the popular view, voiced by telegraph users and promoted by the companies themselves, of the telegraph corporation as a faithful servant of individual families and communities. In so doing, they embedded the historical and popular perception of the corporation as ‘servant’ into the definition of ‘public service’ …

Atkinson, Evelyn, Telegraph Torts: The Lost Lineage of the Public Service Corporation (September 28, 2022), 121 Michigan Law Review 8 (2023).