【Acrylic Painting by Dennis Tang】
(Paintings and Photos may not be relevant to the incident described; The Making of @ Youtube: Dennis’ notebook)
Donoghue v Stevenson (1932) is a landmark case in the area of law related to ‘negligence‘ and ’duty of care‘.
In this case, Mrs Donoghue’s friend bought her a ginger-beer from a café in Paisley, she consumed half of the bottle and a decomposed snail was found in the bottle. She then fell ill.
Mrs Donoghue was not able to claim through breach of warranty of a contract as she was not party to any contract (she didn’t buy the beer). She still issued proceedings against Stevenson , the ginger beer manufacturer based on negligence.
The House of Lords eventually held that the manufacturer owed a duty of care to her, which was breached because it was reasonably foreseeable that failure to ensure the product’s safety would lead to harm to consumers, and there was also a sufficiently proximate relationship between consumers and product manufacturers.
This case established the area of law related to negligence, including ‘duty of care’ and ‘neighbour principle’.
