Donoghue vs Stevenson, [1932] AC 562On August 26, 1928, Mrs. May Donoghue visited a bar in Paisley, Scotland. The owner ofthe bar poured part of a bottle of ginger beer on top of her ice-cream; her friend poured onthe remainder. On doing so, they saw the remains of a snail in a state of decomposition.Mrs. Donoghue later claimed to have contracted gastro-enteritis from drinking the bottle,and therefore she wanted to be compensated financially by Stevenson, who hadmanufactured the bottle.This case between Mrs. Donoghue, who allegedly suffered damage from drinkingfrom a bottle that contained spoiled ginger beer, and Stevenson, who produced thisbottle, has become a classic of tort law. Tort law deals with cases in which a victimsuffered damage and wants someone else to compensate the damage.Main Principle of Tort Law At first sight, it may seem strange that if peoplesuffer damage, someone else must compensate them. In fact, this would be anexception to the main principle of tort law: Everyone must in principle bear his owndamage.That everyone bears his own damage and that therefore nobody else mustcompensate it is the starting point, the main principle of tort law. One might seethe field of tort law as dealing with the question when we must make exceptions tothis principle. In this connection, several questions pop up:
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