DONOGHUE V STEVENSON
The case involved by May Donoghue also known as "Paisley snail" or "Snail in the bottle" case where Donoghue drank a bottle of ginger beer in a cafe she entered in Paisley, occupied by one Minchella is the most famous case in the common law. The ginger beer was bought by a friend who accompanied her at Minchella. Two slabs of ice cream each of which was placed in a tumbler and contents of a bottle of ginger beer were poured on it. The defender Stevenson was the manufacturer of the ginger beer and bought from him by Minchella. The ginger beer was contained in a bottle made of dark opaque glass. A decomposed snail floated out when the friend was pouring the remains in the contents of the bottle. As a result of the nauseating sight of the snail and the impurities in the ginger beer which Donoghue had already consumed, she had suffered from shock and severe Gastroenteritis.
Normally, the consumer can claim for injuries resulting from bad products on the basis of the contract of sale between the seller and the consumer. Mrs Donoghue (the Appellant) did not have any contractual relationship or privity, with the manufacturer Mr Stevenson (the Defendant) therefore was required to claim for negligence.
The three members of the house which is the tribunal decided a case so remarkable in the history of the law who were in favour of allowing the appeal were Lord Atkin, Macmillan, and Thankerton. Those who dissented were Lord Buckmaster and Tomlin.
Legal Issues Involved - The house of lords, in this case, analysed the important legal issues: Is the duty of care owed to the person injured; the privity of contract; the liability of manufacturer to consumer in the occasion of operations executed with dangerous articles and negligence, the neighbour principle.
Principles laid down by Lord Atkin - The king's college Address
On May 26, 1932, Lord Atkin rose at last, amid the splendour of the great chamber of the House of Lords, to deliver his immortal speech in Donoghue v. Stevenson.
Lord Atkin reminded the House of the words of Lord Esher in Le Lievre v. Gould: “If one man is near to another, or near to the property of another, a duty lies on him not to do that which may cause a personal injury to that other or may injure his property.” Using the thoughts he had expressed the previous autumn at King’s College, Lord Atkin then melded Lord Esher’s dictum with the parable of the good Samaritan. The neighbourhood was a mental rather than a physical state. It would be enough to impose on David Stevenson a duty of care such that those in the position of May Donoghue ought to have been in his mind when he was bottling the ginger beer. She was his neighbour in spirit.
Lord Atkin made four statements, all of equal importance to any real understanding of his speech. He started with this fundamental caution:
The liability for negligence, whether you style it such or treat it as in other systems as a species of “culpa”, is no doubt based upon a general public sentiment of moral wrongdoing for which the offender must pay. But acts or omissions which any moral code would censure cannot in a practical world be treated so as to give a right to every person injured by them to demand relief.
(In this statement Lord Atkin faithfully echoed his previous words at King’s College: “Law and morality do not cover identical fields”; “Morality extends beyond the more limited range in which you can lay down the definite prohibitions of the law.”)
Lord Atkin then stated his “neighbour principle”:
Donoghue v Stevenson. One of the five judges, Lord Atkin, formulated what has become known as the neighbour test in this way: At present, I content myself with pointing out that in English law there must be, and is, some general conception of relations giving rise to a duty of care, of which the particular cases found in books are but instances. The liability for negligence, whether you style it such or treat it as in other systems as a species of "culpa", is no doubt based upon a general public sentiment of moral wrongdoing for which the offender must pay. But acts or omissions which any moral code would censure cannot in a practical world be treated so as to give a right to every person injured by them to demand relief. In this way rules of law arise which limit the range of complaints and the extent of their remedy. 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.
(Here, again, was “the golden maxim” previously mentioned at King’s College, within which “the whole law of torts could be comprised,” and which Lord Atkin later applied in Fardon.)
Three pages on, we find his second caution:
I venture to say that in the branch of the law which deals with civil wrongs, dependent in England at any rate entirely upon the application by judges of general principles also formulated by judges, it is of particular importance to guard against the danger of stating propositions of law in wider terms than is necessary, lest essential factors be omitted in the wider survey and the inherent adaptability of English law be unduly restricted.
And sixteen pages further on, Lord Atkin stated the principle on which his judgement rested — the ratio decidendi of May Donoghue’s case:
[A] manufacturer of products, which he sells in such a form as to show that he intends them to reach the ultimate consumer in the form in which they left him with no reasonable possibility of intermediate examination, and with the knowledge that the absence of reasonable care in the preparation or putting up of the products will result in an injury to the consumer’s life or property, owes a duty to the consumer to take that reasonable care.
The above statement was about Product liability principle stated by Lord Atkins.
The principles laid down by Lord Atkin, himself an Australian, Welshman, or Irishman, were supported by two Scots, Lord Macmillan and Lord Thankerton, but vigorously opposed, of course, by Lord Buckmaster, and by Lord Tomlin.
Why then, does May Donoghue’s case continue to hold such an enduring fascination for lawyers the world over?
The magnificent language of Lord Atkin, the profound mysteries of the neighbour principle, the clash between the Law Lords, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the decision. The meeting of the common and civil law worlds. The collision between principles of contract and tort law that started fifty years of jurisprudential upheaval. The contrast of sacred and mundane, splendour and poverty, the sublime and — at least in the manner of its pleading — the slightly ridiculous.
Cost awarded out of court
It states that "and his executors settled out of court, for £200, well short of the original claim of £500 plus legal costs." The cost today (2012) would be nearer £250,000
Surely there will never be such a case again!
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