Professional Documents
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The facts
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBlpl2c-uaU&feature=p
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a friend of Mrs Donoghue bought her a bottle of ginger
beer.
The beer was served in a dark, opaque bottle.
Mrs Donoghue had drunk about half the bottle of beer
before emptying the remaining ginger beer into a glass.
As she did this, a partly decomposed snail floated out of
the bottle.
The decision
The House of Lords (3:2) decided in
Applying precedent
The legal principles have been applied and
extended to many other cases.
A later Australian case heard in the Privy
Council (which then was where you
appealed to from the High Court), Grant vs.
Australian Knitting Mills 1936, involved
similar circumstances.
Precedent in action
The operation of the doctrine of precedent is
easier to understand by looking at specific
examples.
The English case of Donoghue v. Stevenson
1932 is a landmark case, because the
fundamental legal principle of negligence
was established, and later applied in
Australia.