Farwell v. Boston & Worcester R.R. Corp, 45 Mass. 49 (Mass. 1842), Massachusetts Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw used a contract rationale to prevent a railroad worker from recovering from his employer, Boston and Worcester Railroad, for an injury due to the negligence of a switch tender employed by the same company, even though a third party or passenger would likely have been able to recover for the same injury. In Shaw's view, the injured worker was in as good a position as his employer had been (indeed, most likely a better one) to monitor the work of his fellow workers. It followed that to allow Farwell to recover compensatory damages would have been to create a moral hazard in the workplace, softening the blow of employee carelessness for those best able to prevent it.
This created the fellow servant rule. In the years and decades that followed, courts in Massachusetts and elsewhere in the United States developed a panoply of doctrines that made it exceedingly difficult for industrial workers to go to law for insurance against the risks of their work. Employees were said to assume the ordinary risks inherent in the workplace. And where an employee's own negligence (no matter how slight) contributed to his injury, he was barred from recovering damages, even from a negligent employer. The contributory fault doctrine connected the law of work risks to a much broader array of nineteenth-century legal rules that limited the law's risk-spreading capacity. People entering onto someone else's land were owed only a limited duty of care, and sometimes no duty of care at all.
The Farwell opinion has been seen by some scholars as providing the financial stability necessary to secure the success of an infant railroad industry.