Entries Competitors were asked for ‘the head notes of a law report… based on the facts of any one nursery rhyme’.

Law Society’s Gazette, February 1960

Christmas CompetitionThe Results and a Selection from the Entries Competitors were asked for ‘the head notes of a law report… based on the facts of any one nursery rhyme’.

Foster v Gloucester Corporation The plaintiff was a medical practitioner, practising near Gloucester. The defendants were the Highway Authority for that City. A hole dug in the Highway by the defendant’s workmen was left unguarded by them, when they took shelter from a cloudburst. The hole became filled with rainwater, and the plaintiff fell into it, suffering injuries.

The plaintiff claimed damages for (1) personal injuries, and (2) loss of profits due to the fact that he was so unnerved by his experience that he could never again bring himself to visit the City, and so lost a number of influential and profitable patients.

Held – (1) That the cloudburst constituted an Act of God; (2) that this did not absolve the defendants from their statutory obligations; (3) that failure to guard or light the hole in the roadway constituted misfeasance and not mere non-feasance; (4) that the plaintiff was accordingly entitled to recover damages for personal injuries and shock; (5) that the damages claimed under the second head were too remote and that the plaintiff’s claim in that respect must accordingly be dismissed.David Drummond

Muffet v Arachnides Judgment was given for the defendant after it had been admitted that ‘plaintiff was of a nervous disposition which defendant could not have reasonably been expected to know. It was also established that defendant had not made himself up or acted in any way with the deliberate intention of frightening plaintiff’.P. G. Bryan Daunt

… in the Humpty-Dumpty case the Court decided that ‘the statement… by the plaintiff that a word meant what he chose it to mean, although perfectly reasonable if made by a lawyer, was an absurdity if made by a layman’.C. Servian