Famous Cases : Nine Trials That Changed the Law

A collection of some of the most famous cases in English law - with an explantion of how they changed things - by two leading commentators. Every UK lawyer knows of Woolmington v. Director of Public Prosecutions, the ruling which established the golden thread of English law whereby the burden of proof lies with the prosecutor in a criminal trial, even in the case of murder. But who was Woolmington and how many people know that he escaped the death penalty at the eleventh hour, or that he was twice tried for murder? Lords give man back his life as the Western Gazette put it. Likewise, in the civil law, how and why did a Mrs. Donoghue come to be drinking a bottle of ginger beer containing the remnants of a snail, an event which would ultimately determine at the highest level - that the categories of negligence are never closed? And how did the tranquil market town of Wednesbury come to be legal shorthand for unreasonableness. In Famous Cases: Nine Trials that Changed the Law