A woman in Paisley drank a bottle of ginger beer she had not paid for — and modern liability was invented to give her a remedy.
Ten items. Work through the four activities — say your answer out loud before you reveal it.
Three terms: liability · damages · precedent. Say the right one, then reveal.
Read each part. After it, there's a quick check (answer from memory first), then one question to discuss.
On the evening of 26 August 1928, May Donoghue took the tram from Glasgow to Paisley and went into the Wellmeadow Café with a friend. She was a shop assistant, separated from her husband, and not well off. The friend ordered and paid: an ice cream for Mrs Donoghue, with a bottle of ginger beer to pour over it.
The bottle was dark, opaque glass — you could not see through it, which is the detail the whole case turns on. The café owner poured some over the ice cream. Mrs Donoghue drank it. Then her friend poured out the rest, and, according to the account she later gave, the decomposed remains of a snail came out with it. She said she was made ill: shock, and gastroenteritis serious enough to send her to the Glasgow Royal Infirmary.
She wanted a remedy, and here she ran straight into a wall. She had no contract with anybody. Her friend had bought the drink, so any contract was between the friend and the café owner, and under the doctrine of privity, a stranger to a contract cannot sue on it. She could not sue the café owner, who had sold her nothing and could not have inspected a sealed opaque bottle in any event. That left one target: David Stevenson, the man whose name was on the bottle, who manufactured ginger beer a few streets away — and to whom she was a complete stranger.
1. Why could Mrs Donoghue not sue in contract, and who could have?
2. Why does it matter so much that the bottle was made of dark, opaque glass?
1. She had no contract with anyone: her friend bought the drink. Under privity of contract only a party to the contract can sue on it, so the friend — who suffered no harm — held the only contractual claim, and Mrs Donoghue — who suffered the harm — held none.
2. Because nobody between the factory and her lips could have discovered the problem. The bottle was sealed and you could not see into it, so there was no realistic opportunity for intermediate examination by the retailer or the consumer — which is precisely the situation the eventual rule was built to cover.
The law she was arguing against was almost a century old and had been stated with confidence. In 1842, in a case about a mail coach that collapsed and injured its driver, the courts had held that a person who was not party to the contract of repair could not sue on it — and if the rule were otherwise, one judge had warned, there would be no limit to the actions that might follow. Around this hard rule the courts had allowed only narrow exceptions: things dangerous in themselves, such as guns or poisons, and cases of outright fraud. Ginger beer was not a gun.
Her counsel, Walter Leechman, had already been running similar snail-in-a-bottle claims and losing. But he framed this one to reach the general question rather than the exceptions: did a manufacturer owe a duty, independent of any contract, to the person who would ultimately consume the product? The case went up on that point of law alone — not on the facts, which were never tried. Formally, everyone argued as if the snail were there, to see whether, if it were, she had any claim at all.
It reached the House of Lords, then the final court for Scotland as well as England, in December 1931. Mrs Donoghue proceeded as a pauper, which required her to swear that she was not worth £5 in the world apart from her clothing and the subject of the action. Both sides knew what was really at stake: not one bottle, but whether a manufacturer's responsibility ran to the millions of people who would open its sealed products in the years to come.
1. What was the rule she had to overcome, and what exceptions already existed?
2. Why is it significant that the facts of the case were never actually tried?
1. That liability for defective goods ran through contract only, so a person outside the contract had no claim (the 1842 mail-coach rule). The exceptions were narrow: articles dangerous in themselves, and fraud.
2. Because the House of Lords was deciding a pure question of law: assuming the snail was in the bottle, is there a claim? It means the famous case rests on facts nobody ever proved — and that the rule it produced was designed in the abstract, for every future case rather than this one.
On 26 May 1932 the House of Lords decided for Mrs Donoghue, by three to two. The leading judgment was Lord Atkin's, and its most quoted sentence is a question: "Who, then, in law, is my neighbour?" His answer was a definition — persons so closely and directly affected by what I do that I ought reasonably to have them in contemplation when I act. Take reasonable care, he said, to avoid acts or omissions you can reasonably foresee are likely to injure such a person.
That is the wide principle. Alongside it he stated a narrow one, and the difference between them has kept lawyers employed for ninety years: a manufacturer who sells products in a form showing that he intends them to reach the ultimate consumer in the state in which they left him, with no reasonable possibility of intermediate examination, owes that consumer a duty to take reasonable care. Every clause in that sentence is doing work — and every clause has been fought over since.
The two dissenters were not being obtuse. Lord Buckmaster argued that the authorities were against it, that the exceptions were narrow for good reason, and that a general principle of this kind had no natural stopping point: if it applies to ginger beer, why not to the builder of a house, or the repairer of a car, and to whom exactly does it not apply? Certainty in commerce, he thought, was worth more than a remedy in a hard case, and any change of this size belonged to Parliament rather than to five judges. That argument lost, and it has never quite gone away.
The rest is smaller than the principle. David Stevenson died later that year; the case settled in 1934, reportedly for around £200, and never came to trial. Nobody ever established that there was a snail. May Donoghue went back to Glasgow, worked, and died in 1958, largely unaware that she had become the most cited claimant in the common-law world.
1. State the neighbour principle in your own words, and then the narrow manufacturer rule.
2. What was the dissent's strongest point — put it as strongly as you can?
1. Wide: you must take reasonable care to avoid acts or omissions you can reasonably foresee would be likely to injure people so closely and directly affected by your conduct that you ought to have them in mind. Narrow: a manufacturer who puts goods out in sealed form, intending them to reach the consumer unexamined, owes that consumer reasonable care.
2. That the new principle had no natural boundary. Once duty is defined by foreseeability, the class of people who can sue you is limited only by imagination — bad for certainty, and a change of that magnitude was a matter for legislation, not for a court deciding a case about a bottle.
Lord Atkin's famous sentence is not a piece of rhetoric. It is a definition, and it is built almost entirely out of relative clauses. This is the single most useful structure in legal English: it is how you say precisely who a rule catches, and — just as importantly — who it lets go.
Each pair of sentences is about an e-scooter hire company. Decide which version limits the class, and write in the missing punctuation choice: write commas or no commas, and then say what changes.
1. Intended meaning: only the scooters with worn brakes are covered. → "A scooter whose brakes are worn must be withdrawn from the fleet."
2. Intended meaning: every rider is covered; the helmet detail is extra information. → "The rider who is given a helmet at collection is owed a duty of care."
3. Intended meaning: only the riders who were never told the scooter had been repaired. → "Riders were not informed of the repair may have a claim." (relative pronoun)
1. no commas / no commas 2. commas / commas 3. who (or that)
Read 2 again without the commas: it would mean that only riders who were handed a helmet are owed a duty — and the company has just written itself a defence against every rider who wasn't.
A food delivery platform is drafting the clause that decides who it is responsible to. Complete each gap with a relative structure — one or two words.
1. "This policy applies to any customer receives a meal prepared by a partner restaurant." (subject relative)
2. "The duty is owed to the person the meal is delivered, whether or not that person placed the order." (preposition + relative — two words)
3. "The platform is not liable for meals in a manner permitting inspection before consumption." (reduced relative — past participle)
4. "A partner restaurant kitchen has failed an inspection shall be suspended from the platform." (possessive relative)
5. "This clause does not apply in circumstances the customer has altered the product after delivery." (preposition + relative — two words)
1. who / that 2. to whom 3. supplied / sold / delivered 4. whose 5. in which
Sentence 2 is Mrs Donoghue's problem solved in advance: the duty follows the person who consumes, not the person who paid.
A small brewery asks you: "We sell to bars, not to the public. Are we responsible if a customer in a bar is made ill?" Complete the reply so that it opens wide, then narrows honestly. Read it aloud when you finish.
"The short answer is yes. Since 1932 your duty has not depended on who paid you. You owe reasonable care to any person can foreseeably be harmed by what you put into the market — and the drinker in the bar is exactly the person the product was always intended to reach. Because you supply in sealed containers, there is no realistic point the bar could inspect the contents, which strengthens the claim rather than weakening it. Where you have more protection is with a batch after leaving you — stored badly, decanted, or mixed. And a supplier records show a clean, documented process is in a very different position from one cannot say what happened on the day."
who · whom (or that … for) · at which · altered / tampered with / mishandled · whose · which / that
Notice the shape of the advice: one wide sentence that tells the client the truth, then three narrowing clauses that tell them where to put their effort. That order is the professional habit — the qualifications come after the answer, never instead of it.
Take these into the Speak tab: you will be defining the class of people your client is responsible to, under time pressure.
A note before we argue: the case is summarised here, dates and figures are approximate, and legal systems differ — this is material for discussion and for language, not legal advice on any real matter.
All of it out loud, against the clock. These are the registers you actually switch between: explaining a rule, arguing a side you don't hold, and telling four different rooms the same thing.
Present this case to an intelligent person who has never heard of it. Structure it: the café in Paisley → why she had no claim → the wall of privity and the 1842 rule → the question the Lords were actually asked → the neighbour principle and the narrow manufacturer rule → the dissent → what happened to the actual case.
Finish with one sentence saying what changed for everyone else. Use at least five key terms (privity of contract, duty of care, negligence, foreseeable, liability, precedent, ratio, dissenting judgment, damages, floodgates).
You are Lord Buckmaster's counsel, and you must persuade a modern audience. Your case: the authorities were against this; the exceptions were narrow deliberately; a duty defined by foreseeability has no stopping point; and if the law of a whole economy is to change, Parliament should change it, having heard from the people it will bind.
Make it genuinely strong — no straw men, and concede what is genuinely conceded about Mrs Donoghue's position. Then do it again in ninety seconds — the compression is the exercise.
Take one product or service and explain who is owed a duty of care — four ways, one minute each. Notice how much of the definition survives each translation.
Prefer not to use anything of your own? Take one of these instead: