We take it for granted that, when we buy something, we should expect it to be free from undesirable “extras”. But whom do we blame when things don’t pan out this way?
Mrs Donoghue bought a bottle of ginger beer from a café. This bottle was sealed and she had drunk most of it when she discovered that a dead and decomposing snail was in the bottle. It was not detectable before the bottle had been mostly consumed, but after she discovered the snail she was, unsurprisingly, shocked. Adding to this, she suffered gastro-enteritis after the fact, and as a result of both of these things she sued the manufacturer of the bottle, our defendant Mr Stevenson.
The case reached the House of Lords, by which point the facts of the case as outlined above were, thankfully, clear and beyond dispute. The only thing remaining to be solved were the following two questions:
- Was the manufacturer of the ginger beer responsible for damages suffered not by the party to whom the bottle was sold (which would have been the café) but also for damages suffered by the end consumer?
- Were they liable for this even though the error was due to negligence rather than fraud?
For the first question, there seemed to be precedent against Mrs Donoghue in Winterbottom v Wright, a previous case: “The only safe rule is to confine the right to recover to those who enter into the contract; if we go one step beyond that, there is no reason why we should not go fifty.”
However, Lord Atkin challenged this by quoting the 1893 case Le Lievre v Gould: “That case established that, under certain circumstances, one man may owe a duty to another, even though there is no contract between them”. So, there were two conflicting pieces of previous judgment. The House of Lords had to reconcile this difference by looking at the purpose of the law, rather than at pure precedent. What makes this case interesting is that, despite not calling on Christianity as explicitly as R v Dudley and Stephens did, Lord Atkin does clearly draw on the parable of the good samaritan and the injunction to “love thy neighbour” that Jesus gives in all three synoptic gospels. Lord Atkin stated:
The rule that you are to love your neighbour becomes in law, you must not injure your neighbour; and the lawyer’s question, Who is my neighbour? receives a restricted reply. You must take reasonable care to avoid acts or omissions which you can reasonably foresee would be likely to injure your neighbour. Who, then, in law is my neighbour? The answer seems to be — persons who are so closely and directly affected by my act that I ought reasonably to have them in contemplation as being so affected when I am directing my mind to the acts or omissions which are called in question
As for the second question, the court considered it but ultimately found that whether or not the manufacturer’s carelessness reached the legal bar of negligence was more or less irrelevant: “There is no presumption of negligence in such a case as the present, nor is there any justification for applying the maxim, res ipsa loquitur (the thing speaks for itself).” In other words, the court did not conclude that Mr Stevenson’s careless actions were “negligent”, but based on the answer to the first question, the case was decided regardless.
Returning to that, then, I find this progression from explicit reliance on religious principles to implicit reliance fascinating, as it reveals a general progression in the connection between religion and law, and perceptions of the same: society had, between 1884 and 1932, moved slightly further in the secular direction, and this can be seen even in the minutiae of the wording of legal judgments. It is for this reason that I place Donoghue v Stevenson as the case of the week.
An aside: I apologise to regular readers for having failed to write a case of the week during all of July. This was due to a combination of end of year exams in school, a bereavement in the family, having to manage the house alone due to that, a debate competition, and a piano exam to top things off. It was truly a hectic month, but I am glad to be back in the rhythm of things.