''Vaughan v Menlove'' (1837) 132 ER 490 (CP) is a leading

English tort law English tort law concerns the compensation for harm to people's rights to health and safety, a clean environment, property, their economic interests, or their reputations. A "tort" is a wrong in civil, rather than criminal law, that usually requ ...

case that first introduced the concept of the

reasonable person In law, a reasonable person, reasonable man, or the man on the Clapham omnibus, is a hypothetical person of legal fiction crafted by the courts and communicated through case law and jury instructions. Strictly according to the fiction, it i ...

in law.

Facts

As hay decomposes, heat is generated. In the absence of ventilation, the increased heat can cause a fire. The defendant built a hay rick (or

haystack Hay is grass, legumes, or other herbaceous plants that have been cut and dried to be stored for use as animal fodder, either for large grazing animals raised as livestock, such as cattle, horses, goats, and sheep, or for smaller domesticated ...

) near the boundary of his land which bordered the plaintiff's land. The defendant's hay rick had been built with a precautionary "chimney" to prevent the hay from spontaneously igniting, but it ignited anyway. He had been warned several times over a period of five weeks that the manner in which he built the hay rick was dangerous, but he said "he would chance it." Consequently, the hay ignited and spread to the plaintiff's land, burning down two of the plaintiff's cottages.

Judgment

Trial

At trial the judge instructed the

jury A jury is a sworn body of people (jurors) convened to hear evidence and render an impartial verdict (a finding of fact on a question) officially submitted to them by a court, or to set a penalty or judgment. Juries developed in England d ...

to consider whether the fire had been caused by gross negligence on the part of the defendant, and stated the defendant "was utybound to proceed with such reasonable caution as a prudent man would have exercised under such circumstances." The jury found the defendant negligent.

Appeal

The defendant appealed the trial court's verdict, arguing the jury should have instead been instructed to consider "whether he acted bona fide to the best of his judgment; if he had, he ought not to be responsible for the misfortune of not possessing the highest order of intelligence." The court, composed of Tindal CJ, Park J and Vaughan J, rejected the defendant's argument, holding that the lower court's jury instructions were correct and therefore affirming the verdict. The court stated that to judge, The court indicated that although this was a

case of first impression A precedent is a principle or rule established in a previous legal case that is either binding on or persuasive for a court or other tribunal when deciding subsequent cases with similar issues or facts. Common-law legal systems place great value ...

, the "man of ordinary prudence" standard was supported by a similar duty of care applied in cases of

bailment Bailment is a legal relationship in common law, where the owner transfers physical possession of personal property ("chattel") for a time, but retains ownership. The owner who surrenders custody to a property is called the "bailor" and the ind ...

, in which liability was imposed only for negligence relative to that standard. The court also viewed the "reasonable man" standard as supported by the long-settled principle that persons must use their property so as not to harm that of others ('' sic utere tuo ut alienum non laedas''). Finally, the court held that the question of whether the defendant was liable because of negligence in violation of the reasonable person standard was a proper question for the jury ("The care taken by a prudent man has always been the rule laid down; and as to the supposed difficulty of applying it, a jury has always been able to say, whether, taking that rule as their guide, there has been negligence....").

Significance

The defense counsel had argued that there was no duty imposed on the defendant to be responsible for the exercise of any given degree of care, in contrast to the duty of care imposed on common carriers and bailees, or under an implied contract. This case was decided during a transitional period in the history of the

common law In law, common law (also known as judicial precedent, judge-made law, or case law) is the body of law created by judges and similar quasi-judicial tribunals by virtue of being stated in written opinions."The common law is not a brooding omniprese ...

rule on

negligence Negligence (Lat. ''negligentia'') is a failure to exercise appropriate and/or ethical ruled care expected to be exercised amongst specified circumstances. The area of tort law known as ''negligence'' involves harm caused by failing to act as ...

and liability. Until the mid- to late 19th century in the United States and

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe ...

, there was no settled standard for tort liability. Courts in the early 19th century often found a negligence requirement for liability to exist only for common carriers or bailees. English and U.S. courts later began to move toward a standard of negligence based on a universal duty of care in light of the "reasonable person" test. ''Vaughan v. Menlove'' is often cited as the seminal case which introduced the “reasonable person” test not only to the tort law, but to jurisprudence generally. This assertion is false.Pi, Daniel, Francesco Parisi, Barbara Luppi.
Quantifying Reasonable Doubt
72 Rutgers U.L. Rev. 455 (2019), tracing back the chain of citations to the typographical error in Prosser’s ''Law of Torts'' and also identifying several earlier cases using the reasonable person standard. A 2019 law review article discovered that the misidentification of ''Vaughan v. Menlove'' as the birthplace of the “reasonable man of ordinary prudence” originated from a typographical error in an influential tort treatise, Prosser’s ''Law of Torts'' (4th edition), which erroneously cites the date of the case as “1738” rather than “1837.” Although no cases earlier than 1738 were found to apply a reasonable person standard, there exist several cases prior to 1837 applying the reasonable person standard. The error was corrected after the fourth edition of Prosser’s treatise, however subsequent legal scholars have continued to repeat the claim that ''Vaughan v. Menlove'' is where the “reasonable person” concept first appeared in the law, as the misattribution propagates indirectly through a

citation network A citation graph (or citation network), in information science and bibliometrics, is a directed graph that describes the citations within a collection of documents. Each vertex (or node) in the graph represents a document in the collection, an ...

.Van der Vet, Paul E. and Harm Nijveen
''Propagation of errors in citation networks''
Research Integrity and Peer Review 1:3 (2016)

Notes