About

My office building is downwind from a Love’s Bakery. In case you didn’t know, Love’s is “[t]he largest wholesale baker of original and distributed breads, bunds, donuts and pies in Hawaii.” (Don’t ask me what a “bund” is--that quote is direct from their website.) At any rate, those breads and bunds and whatever else they’re baking smell absolutely amazing. As I drove past Love’s tonight on my way home, I thought about bread, and flour, and a certain Mr. Byrne of Liverpool, England. About 150 years ago, Byrne was walking along Scotland Road when a barrel of flour fell from a second floor window and knocked him out. Apparently he had been walking by the window of the defendant’s shop (Mr. Boadle, I presume), who just happened to be a “dealer in flour.” Naturally, Byrne filed a lawsuit against Boadle to get some quid for his troubles. After all, barrels of flour aren’t just supposed to fall out of windows, right? Well, what seems like an easy question to answer wasn’t so easy for the Exchequer Court in 1863. To be awarded any compensation, Byrne had to show that Boadle had some responsibility for what happened. In other words, Byrne had to show that Boadle was negligent--that he had a duty to be careful, that he failed in that duty, and that his failure caused Byrne’s injuries. Problem was, Byrne couldn’t really show any action on the part of Boadle. One minute Byrne was ambling down Scotland Road, then next minute he’s waking up covered in flour. The witnesses’ testimony didn’t help, either--at best, one witness saw a barrel of flour falling from Boadle’s window, but couldn’t explain how it happened. So at the end of the day, are we left with some poor guy, laid up for two weeks, covered in flour and out of luck because no one saw Boadle do anything untoward with his flour barrels? Not so fast, wrote Chief Baron Pollock in his opinion. Barrels of flour don’t just fall on their own out of second-story windows; Boadle must have done something negligent for that to have happened. Or, as Pollock wrote, “There are certain cases of which it may be said res ipsa loquitur . . . . A barrel could not roll out of a warehouse without some negligence, and to say that a plaintiff who is injured by it must call witnesses from the warehouse to prove negligence seems to me preposterous.” And with that, Mr. Byrne got his fifty quid. And thus was born the legal term res ipsa loquitur--the thing speaks for itself. In this case, “the thing” was the falling flour barrel; we don’t need other evidence of negligence when we’ve got 100 pounds of flying carbs to testify for us. Sometimes, the situation itself provides the explanation. (Side note--Chief Baron is a much hotter title than Chief Justice. In my opinion. Just sayin’.) -ann Byrne v. Boadle opinion