Many times we've heard about personal injury lawsuits as examples of overreaction and entitlement, with the most famous example being the McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit. Often the facts behind these "frivolous lawsuit" cases are very different from what the public story becomes. Way back in 1928, May Donoghue found a decomposing snail in her ginger beer at a cafe in Scotland. Her complaint brought a shrug from the cafe owner. Donoghue got sick. Then she went after the manufacturer of the soda.
By the time the case arrived in court, people in Glasgow had already started to talk about it. Many questioned Donoghue’s motives and attacked her character: Some said that she was doing it for the money, while others claimed she merely wanted attention. Donoghue’s separation from her husband, whom she had recently left after he’d had several affairs, was also wielded against her and used as evidence of her untrustworthiness.
“Mrs. Donoghue was a married woman, but in the case, she is portrayed as going out with a ‘friend’ for ice cream and ginger beer,” says Erika Chamberlain, the dean of the law faculty at the University of Western Ontario. Chamberlain wrote her doctoral dissertation on the case, which went down in legal history as Donoghue v. Stevenson. “There was a lot of speculation as to whether the ‘friend’ was in fact a lover.”
Details about Donoghue’s personal life — her working-class childhood, her unhappy marriage to Henry Donoghue — were dissected in the press. She was often portrayed as crazy or a liar. According to Chamberlain, one defense lawyer tried to claim that the snail never even existed.
Nonetheless, Donoghue pressed on.
The lawsuit was long and complicated, but eventually established that manufacturers have some responsibility for the quality of their products. Read what happened at Narratively. -via Damn Interesting
(Image credit: Min Heo)