Донью v Стивенсон: Негізгі сот шешімі және міндеттемелер қағидасы

1932 UK leading case on negligence

Donoghue v Stevenson [1932] AC 562 was a landmark court decision in Scots delict law and English tort law by the House of Lords. It laid the foundation of the modern law of negligence in common law jurisdictions worldwide, as well as in Scotland, establishing general principles of the duty of care. Also known as the "Paisley Snail" or "Snail in the Bottle" case, the case involved Mrs May Donoghue drinking a bottle of ginger beer in a café in Paisley, Renfrewshire. Unknown to her or anybody else, a decomposed snail was in the bottle. She fell ill, and subsequently sued the ginger beer manufacturer, Mr Stevenson. The House of Lords 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. There was also a sufficiently proximate relationship between consumers and product manufacturers. In Paisley, she went to the Wellmeadow Café. A friend, and rejected the cases in favour of a narrower interpretation of a duty of care with the example of negligently poisoned food, for which there had been no claim against the manufacturer. "If this were the result of the authorities, I should consider the result a grave defect in the law, and so contrary to principle that I should hesitate long before following any decision to that effect which had not the authority of this House". in favour of his view. opining that "few cases can have lived so dangerously and lived so long",]]

Lord Tomlin concurred with Lord Buckmaster. While he agreed with Lord Atkin that the duty of care a manufacturer owed to its consumers was the same regardless of the product they produced, he held that no general duty of care existed and that the fact the product was in a sealed container made no difference to the finding of a such duty. to the widest, suggested by Lord Normand, who had been one of Stevenson's counsel, that Lord Atkin's neighbour principle was the ratio.|group=Note

Stevenson's business was taken over by his widow, Mary, and his son, the third David Stevenson in the family. It became a limited company (David Stevenson (Beers and Minerals) Limited) on 1 July 1950; the family sold their shares in 1956. The Glen Lane manufacturing plant was demolished in the 1960s. The neighbour principle itself was first mentioned in relation to law by Francis Buller

In precedent, there was an obiter suggestion by Lord Esher in Heaven v Pender that "whenever one person is by circumstances placed in such a position with regard to another that every one of ordinary sense would at once recognise that if he did not use ordinary care and skill in his own conduct he would cause danger of injury to the person or property of the other, a duty arises to use ordinary care and skill to avoid such danger". in which he stated that Heaven only established that there may be a duty even if there is no contract and that this duty arose if there was proximity between the parties, was also unsuccessful. and MacPherson v. Buick Motor Co., were also influential in the formation of the neighbour principle.

The case was reviewed by Frederick Pollock in a 1933 edition of Law Quarterly Review, in which he commented that there was no doubt as to the importance of the decision and that "a notable step has been made in enlarging and clarifying our conception of a citizen's duty before the law not to turn dangerous or noxious things loose on the world". However, Donoghue otherwise attracted little attention; it was understood only as precedent that manufacturers were liable for injuries their goods cause their ultimate consumers rather than that there was a general principle of liability in negligence. The majority of the Court of Appeal (Lord Justice Cohen and Lord Justice Asquith) therefore held in Candler v Crane, Christmas & Co that Donoghue had not affected tortious liability for negligent misstatement. in 1963 and Home Office v Dorset Yacht Co in 1970. In Home Office, the Home Office had in 1962 taken a group of boys from a borstal to Brownsea Island in Poole Harbour, where seven had escaped overnight and collided one yacht with another belonging to Dorset Yacht Company. The three stage Caparo test for establishing a duty of care requires (i) foreseeability of damage, (ii) a relationship characterised by the law as one of proximity or neighbourhood and (iii) that the situation should be one in which the court considers it would be fair, just and reasonable that the law should impose a duty of given scope on one party for the benefit of the other. In other jurisdictions, such as New Zealand, there is now a two part test for novel fact situations, where the establishment of a duty must be balanced against applicable policy matters.

The judgment and reasoning of Lord Atkin in Donoghue v Stevenson is very similar to the judgment and reasoning applied by Cardozo CJ in the American case of Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad Co., four years earlier. Although the similarity in approach has been noted by commentators, the decision is Palsgraf was not cited in either argument or in the judgments in Donoghue, although Lord Atkin did refer to an earlier decision of Cardozo J: MacPherson v. Buick Motor Co

Today the far reaching changes of the decision for the law of torts is sufficiently well recognised that the case's name is used as a metaphor. For example, Barclays Bank v W J Simms [1980] 1 QB 677 has been described as "the Donoghue v Stevenson of restitution for mistake." It has also been stated that Slade's Case "could be said to be the Donoghue v. Stevenson of contract." Similarly, Jarvis v Swans Tours Ltd has been called "the Donoghue v Stevenson of Tourism Law".

In 1990, a pilgrimage to Paisley was organised by the Canadian Bar Association, the Faculty of Advocates and the Law Society of Scotland. This included a conference in Paisley Town Hall entitled "The Pilgrimage to Paisley: a Salute to Donoghue v Stevenson". and a bench was added in 1992; both were replaced in 2012. In 1996, retired Canadian judge Martin Taylor together with David Hay and Michael Doherty produced a documentary on the case: The Paisley Snail.

In a speech scheduled to be delivered in May 1942 (although delayed by the Second World War), Lord Justice MacKinnon jokingly suggested that it had been proven that Donoghue did not find a snail in the bottle. quote|To be quite candid, I detest that snail I think that [Lord Normand] did not reveal to you that when the law had been settled by the House of Lords, the case went back to Edinburgh to be tried on the facts. And at that trial it was found that there never was a snail in the bottle at all. That intruding gastropod was as much a legal fiction as the Casual Ejector. However, both MacKinnon and Jenkins were unaware that the trial had not gone ahead because of Stevenson's death, and the events following the case were only published in response to the practice note. As Donoghue's factual claims were therefore never tested in court, it is generally held that what happened in the Wellmeadow Café is not proven and will not be known for certain.