Of all the cases that have created new legal rules, Donoghue v Stevenson (1932) is possibly the most significant, as it created a whole new area of legal liability: the tort of negligence.
May Donoghue visited a café in Paisley with a friend. Donoghue’s friend bought her a bottle of ginger beer manufactured by the Stevenson lemonade company. The café owner poured part of the contents of the ginger beer into a glass, which Donoghue drank, and then her friend poured the remainder of the bottle into the glass and a decomposed snail floated out of the bottle. As a result of seeing the snail and having already drunk the contaminated ginger beer, the claimant suffered from shock and gastroenteritis.
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