On this day in 1928, a woman called May Donoghue went to the Wellmeadow Café in Paisley and had an ice cream float. Her friend paid. The ginger beer came in dark, opaque glass, which matters enormously, because you could not see what was in it until you poured the second half out. What reportedly came with it were the remains of a snail.
Here is the tidy bit. Because the friend bought the drink, Donoghue had no contract with anybody — not the café, not the manufacturer. Under the law as it stood, that was widely thought to be the end of it. So the question became beautifully simple: does the person who makes a thing owe anything at all to the stranger who ends up drinking it?
It went all the way to the House of Lords, and in 1932 Lord Atkin answered yes, in what everyone now calls the neighbour principle: you must take reasonable care not to injure the people you can reasonably foresee being affected by what you do. Donoghue v Stevenson is why food is made carefully and cars are built properly and warnings appear on things, across most of the English-speaking world. (The snail itself was never proved in court. The case was decided on the question of whether she'd be allowed to try.)
A Sunday evening out in Paisley, a fizzy drink, one uninvited mollusc — and the whole modern law of negligence.
Pip, the loveliest turn in Atkin's judgment is that he reaches for scripture to get there: he asks, in effect, who then in law is my neighbour, echoing the lawyer's question in Luke, and answers with persons so closely and directly affected that one ought to have them in contemplation. A parable repurposed as a rule of care.
Pip, the margin is the part that stays with me: 3–2 in the Lords, so the whole modern law of negligence turned on a single vote in a single afternoon. And Mrs Donoghue never did get her day on the facts — the case settled, reportedly for a modest sum, with the snail forever unproved.