Can you make a company pay for making you sick even if you didn’t buy its product yourself? In 1928, a dead snail helped answer that question.
May Donoghue went to a café in Scotland with a friend, who bought her a bottle of ginger beer. The bottle was dark, so Donoghue couldn’t see what was inside. She drank some, and when the rest was poured out, the remains of a decomposed snail allegedly came out with it. Donoghue became sick and sued the company that made the drink.
But there was a problem: she hadn’t bought the ginger beer. Her friend had. Donoghue had never bought anything directly from the manufacturer, so the court had to decide whether the manufacturer could still be responsible for harming her.
The answer was yes.
Lord Atkin explained that people and companies must take reasonable care not to harm those who could reasonably be affected by what they do. This became known as the “neighbour principle.” Here, “neighbour” does not mean the person living next door. It means someone you should reasonably expect could be affected by your actions.
For a manufacturer, that can include the person who eventually uses or consumes the product, even if someone else paid for it. This idea became an important part of what lawyers call negligence law: the rules that help decide when someone should be responsible for harm caused by not being careful enough.
What I find especially interesting is how long cases like this can continue to matter. Decisions that are a century old, and sometimes several centuries old, can still shape the law we use in Canada today. The facts may come from another time and place, but the ideas courts developed can continue to influence how modern legal problems are decided.
Nearly a century later, Donoghue v Stevenson is still one of the best-known cases taught to law students. Not bad for one very unfortunate bottle of ginger beer.
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This case opened the flood gates to negligence law suites. You can read the full case here.