One of the most interesting parts of the English legal system is the inherent importance of precedent.
This means that many essential principles of property law that solicitors rely upon to provide essential legal services and build up cases for their clients are often based on potentially centuries of legal precedent, often with their origins in unusual cases.
A dead snail created the duty of care in negligence cases, a smoke ball scam established the core principles of contract law and an errant squib established the chain of causation in a form recognisable today.
In a similar vein, a reservoir established the limits of property law when it comes to the consequences of how land is used that could affect other people’s land.
Rylands v Fletcher
The case of Rylands v Fletcher from 1868 was particularly unusual for the time as the person who was being sued was not directly involved in the actions that led to damages.
Mr John Rylands owned Ainsworth Mill and sought to build a reservoir in 1860 to supply it with water, having developed a textile manufacturing empire that made him the first multi-millionaire in Manchester.
His choice of location was next to the Red House Colliery, a mine that belonged to Thomas Fletcher. During the excavation process, the contractors that Mr Rylands had hired found multiple coal shafts and passages that had been hastily filled with soft sand, soil and debris.
These were left, but when the reservoir filled for the first time, it burst and flooded the mine, causing damage estimated at £937 (£95,000 adjusted for inflation). After his pump failed, an inspector found the shafts, leading to a legal case against Mr Rylands and Jehu Horrocks, the man who owned the land the reservoir lay on.
It was a difficult case to judge at the time, as most negligence cases at the time that established liability were based on intention rather than strict liability based on actionable offences.
The initial judgement at the Liverpool Assizes found in favour of Mr Rylands, who had no way of knowing about the mine shafts as he had merely contracted the work to a competent engineer, who was found liable for negligence.
The case did not end there, however. It progressed to the Exchequer of Pleas, which looked into whether someone could be liable for damages despite not being negligent under the English legal definition of the time, and whether a client could be liable for the actions of contractors.
The second point was rejected, but the first one led to a division in judgement, with the dissenting voice of Baron Bramwell arguing that the actions of the defendants in requesting the excavation work led to the flooding of the plaintiff’s mines.
This was enough for an appeal to the Exchequer Chamber, who overturned the initial ruling in favour of Mr Rylands and established the idea that anyone who brings something onto their land that can cause an actionable problem if it escapes is liable, something confirmed by a final appeal to the House of Lords.
This decision, often described as the Rylands decision in subsequent cases where it has been used, has been kept in the UK, albeit with adjustments that require foreseeable harm and something to be particularly dangerous and out of the ordinary.
