Law Society’s Gazette, December 1970

Letters to the editor – Is it negligence to place a live body in a coffin?In case some of your readers missed what I feel to be a most interesting report of a case which appeared in an English daily newspaper, the facts seem to me worth repeating.

An open lorry was stopped on the road by a hitchhiker and gave him a lift. He climbed into the back of the lorry and was somewhat chastened to discover that the only other item in the back was a coffin. It was, at this time, pouring with rain and the hitchhiker sat disconsolately next to the coffin.

Imagine his horror when after a short time the lid of the coffin lifted and a voice said ‘has the rain stopped?’ The hitchhiker, terrified out of his wits, leapt from the lorry shrieking and broke his leg. He subsequently sued, in the Yugoslavian Courts, the lorry driver and the ‘corpse’ for negligence.

The ‘corpse’ was in fact another hitchhiker whose story was that he had thumbed a lift earlier in the same deluge of rain and to avoid being soaked, and discovering the coffin empty, had climbed inside to keep out of the rain. He heard the lorry stop for somebody else but did not come out of the coffin at that time because he could still hear the rain pouring down. However, conditions in the coffin had become uncomfortable through lack of air and he was obliged to lift the lid in the circumstances and with the result recorded. The Judge found that there was negligence on the part of the lorry driver and the ‘corpse’ because only dead bodies should be placed in a coffin. If the case had come before an English Court it appears to us that one might successfully have argued that travellers in Bohemia must accept the risk that the lids of coffins rise and the occupants thereof speak and it would seem that at the least the doctrine volenti non fit injuria [to a willing person, no injury is done] might succeed – or perhaps your readers could suggest other defences that might prevail.

John Hillman, London W1