A snail in a ginger beer bottle created the modern law of negligence
In a café in Paisley, May Donoghue poured the rest of a ginger beer over her ice cream and saw what looked like a decomposed snail slide out. She could not sue the café, since her friend had bought the drink, so she sued the manufacturer. Her 1932 victory reshaped negligence law across the Commonwealth.
The case, Donoghue v Stevenson, established that manufacturers owe a duty of care to the people who use their products, not just to those they contract with. Lord Atkin turned the biblical command to love your neighbour into a legal rule not to harm your neighbour, defining neighbours as people so closely and directly affected by your conduct that you ought reasonably to have them in mind. Lord Macmillan added that the categories of negligence are never closed. Australian courts adopted the reasoning in a 1936 case against a knitting mill.
A negligence claim typically needs four elements: a duty of care, a breach of it, resulting damage, and a causal link that makes the harm a foreseeable result. England later refined the duty test in the Caparo case of 1990, requiring foreseeable harm, a close relationship between the parties, and that liability be fair, just and reasonable. Breach is usually measured against what a reasonable person would have foreseen, though children are judged against others of their age; an Australian court held a twelve-year-old to the standard of a twelve-year-old, not an adult.
Foreseeability limits responsibility. In Bolton v Stone in 1951, a woman standing outside a cricket ground was hit by a ball, but the House of Lords found such a long shot too improbable to make the club liable. Causation is tested by asking whether harm would have happened but for the breach, though courts recognise that this fails when several causes combine, a problem at the heart of decades of asbestos litigation. Judge Cardozo warned against leaving defendants liable to an indeterminate class, in indeterminate amounts, for an indeterminate time.
Doctors now must tell patients about material risks and reasonable alternatives, following the UK Supreme Court's Montgomery decision.
Source: Negligence
