Walter Leechman (Fact)
Walter Leechman
Paisley Snail Case
Donoghue v Stevenson, 1932
Walter Leechman of Messrs WG Leechman & Co was the Glasgow lawyer who represented Mrs May Donoghue in the most famous case in Scots legal history, and perhaps even all common law legal history: Donoghue v Stevenson.
Essentially, Mrs Donoghue accompanied a friend into Wellmeadow Café in Paisley, where her friend bought a bottle of carbonated juice for her. This turned out to be contaminated owning to the presence of a snail (or possibly a slug) inside the bottle, but Mrs Donoghue did not become aware of this fact until it was too late - she drank some of the juice and became ill with gastroenteritis.
She could not sue the café as she did not have a contract with the owner (it was her friend who had concluded the contract of sale for the juice). Accordingly, her lawyer, Leechman, rasied a case against the manufacturer of the juice, David Stevenson.
The case proceeded to an appeal before the House of Lords, with Leechman conducting the case on a pro bono basis and Mrs Donoghue appearing as a pauper ('in pauperis') since she could not guarantee Stevenson's expenses in the event of defeat.
In the end, the case was settled out of court in her favour. However, it gave rise to the principle of 'duty of care', otherwise known as the 'neighbour principle', which is the cornerstone of the modern Scots law of negligence (delict) and that of many other jurisdictions' laws of negligence (e.g. English and American tort law).
During the hearing Lord Atkin stated the principle thus:
"The rule that you are to love your neighbour becomes in law you must not injure your neighbour; and the lawyer's question: Who is my neighbour? receives a restricted reply. You must take reasonable care to avoid acts or omissions which you can reasonably foresee would be likely to injure your neighbour. Who, then, in law, is my neighbour? The answer seems to be - persons who are so closely and directly affected by my act that I ought reasonably to have them in my contemplation as being so affected when I am directing my mind to the acts or omissions that are called in question... a manufacturer of products, which he sells in such a form as to show that he intends them to reach the ultimate consumer in the form in which they left him with no reasonable possibility of intermediate examination, and with knowledge that the absence of reasonable care in the preparation or putting up of products will result in an injury to the consumer's life or property, owes a duty to the consumer to take that reasonable care."
Pictured above, Joe Bryce, Advocate and Coordinator of Renfrewshire Law Centre's Volunteer Program, stands at the commemorative plaque that marks the location of the old Wellmeadow Café in Paisley, where this most famous case had its origin.
