Imagine that you are meeting a friend that you haven’t seen in a very long time, and you are excited to see her! You meet at a local establishment, and she buys you a soda in a bottle. You sit and talk for a few minutes, drinking the soda and having a wonderful time. As you are laughing about a story you just heard from your friend, you reach for your bottle of soda to finish it off.
As you lift the bottle to your lips, you see something floating in the bottom of the bottle. You look more closely and find a dead snail! You are immediately shocked, and you feel sick to your stomach. You are absolutely disgusted by the fact that you have a dead snail in your soda and that you drank most of your soda with floating parts of this dead snail in it!
Here’s the problem – you did not buy the soda. It seems that you cannot sue for a breach of contract because the contract for the soda was with your friend. You received the soda as a gift, so you have no grounds for a breach of contract lawsuit.
So what do you do?
This is an area of law called “Tort Law.” Torts covers an area where somebody’s wrong causes loss to another person without the two parties having to be in a contractual relationship. “Tort” is the French word for “wrong,” and that is where this type of law comes from.
I embellished this case a little bit for your reading pleasure, but it is a real case from England in 1932. The woman to whom this actually happened to, Mrs. Donoghue brought what is called a “negligence” case against the manufacturer of the soda. Negligence is one of the bigger areas of tort law. Mrs. Donaghue claimed that the manufacturer owed a duty to make sure that the soda was made in a clean place where snails could not get into bottles.
A duty is an obligation that somebody has to another person. Parents have a duty to take care of their children. Drivers of cars have a duty to look in their mirrors before changing lanes. When you breach a duty (when you don’t act like you are supposed to act), you can be liable for whatever damages you have caused.
Lord Atkin, who wrote the opinion for this case in an English court, created what is called the “neighbour principle”: I have a duty towards “persons who are closely and directly affected by my act that I ought reasonably to have them in contemplation as being so affected when I am directing my mind to the acts or omissions that are called in question.” Here’s a link to the actual opinion – it is a bit challenging to read, but it is there if you want to read it.
In the case of the snail and the soda, the appeal was allowed because it seems that there is no other way for the snail to get into the bottle except at the hands of the person who manufactured the soda.
And that’s how a lawsuit can change behavior of companies – by forcing them to pay a penalty to the victim of the wrong, they will put in rules that will help them not commit the same wrong in the future.
I hope you enjoyed that brief look into negligence.
Until next time,
Mike Traywick
Founder of Law School for Teens