Donoghue v Stevenson

Introduction to the Donoghue v Stevenson Digital Resources

If you are looking for full details of the case of Donoghue v Stevenson you have come to the right place.

The Scottish Council of Law Reporting (SCLR) wishes to bring a new dimension to the resources available to researchers on the internet.

Scotland is a small country but it has a legal system to be proud of. SCLR, the charitable body responsible for publishing Session Cases, tries to make it more accessible.

Donoghue v Stevenson, the case of the Paisley snail, is one of the most famous cases to emerge from Scotland. It has captured the imaginations of generations of lawyers and has played a pivotal role in the development of the modern law of negligence. It answered the key question, “Who in law is my neighbour?”.

With help from the Faculty of Advocates, SCLR can now provide a unique resource – online access to the actual court documents which formed the background to this historic decision.

The original legal papers from the Advocates Library are reproduced here as digital copies. In order to make the content of these images accessible to users who cannot view images and to search engines, each page includes a link to a page that contains the corresponding text.

The opinion of Lord Moncrieff in the Outer House may be found at Appendix Page 3 et seq. The Second Division (Inner House) opinions are reproduced in Appendix Page 21 et. seq.

We would like to thank the Faculty of Advocates for all their help and assistance with this project – particularly the Keeper of the Advocates Library, Edgar Prais QC.

We shall leave the further introduction of these new materials to Andrea Longson, formerly Senior Librarian at the Advocates Library whose help has been invaluable.Please see
Introduction by Andrea Longson, formerly Senior Librarian, Advocates Library.