Read more Weird Cases

When other species get involved in legal disputes, the cases are often bizarre. Two fetched up in the courts last week. These are the curious cases of the dog and the fly.

“We are in deep sh*t now,” wrote Newton Johnson in a diary entry that was to mark the beginning of his fall. He was a dentist in Llanelli, Wales, but not a happy one: “This bloody job, who’d be a pigging dentist,” he wrote one night in his log. He turned to a scam in which, with his wife, who was his practice manager, he eventually swindled the public purse out of £37,555 for work he had not carried out. They invented 100 patients including Varlo Johnson. The thing that made it difficult for Varlo to be a patient was that although he has teeth, he is a Hungarian Wirehaired Vizsla, the four-legged pet of Johnson’s sister.

Johnson and his wife were convicted at Swansea Crown Court and jailed, but not before prosecuting counsel had used the nature of the case to inspire some extraordinary oratorical flourishes. Drilling deep into dental language, Justin Gau, for the Crown, told the court that “The fillings they performed were the fillings of their own wallets” and that “They were saying to the public purse ‘open wide’ and performing a series of illegal extractions”. Rinse that.

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Before I mention the fly, let me mention a famous snail in the case of Donoghue v Stevenson. On August 26, 1928, Mrs May Donoghue sat in the Wellmeadow Café in Paisley and drank a ginger beer. The bottle contained the decomposed remains of a snail. Mrs Donoghue suffered from shock and severe gastro-enteritis. She sued the manufacturer for negligence. Lord Atkin stated that, “You must take reasonable care to avoid acts or omissions which you can reasonably foresee would be likely to injure your neighbour”. Her case was settled for £200. Many claimants have since won similar cases, although others have lost.

Now meet the fly. The dead insect was at the bottom of a drinking water bottle in a kitchen in Windsor, Ontario, when it was seen by Martin Mustapha and his wife. He became obsessed with the event and its implications for the health of his family. Then he developed a major depressive disorder, phobia and anxiety that affected his sleep, sex life, business and willingness to take showers. He sued Culligan, the Canadian company that supplied the water bottle, for $341,000 for psychiatric injury. The trial judge awarded him damages but the Canadian Supreme Court has just rejected his claim.

Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin states in the unanimous ruling that the injuries were not "reasonably foreseeable" by ordinary standards. She said Mustapha failed to show that it was foreseeable that “a person of ordinary fortitude” would suffer serious injury from seeing the fly in the bottle of water.

Mustapha claims the case cost him $500,000 as the result of therapy and legal fees. The case has buzzed in the heads of all the lawyers, doctors, and company directors for six years, and has now had the attention of 12 senior Canadian judges. The total cost is over $1 million and has taken over 50,000 person-at-work hours if you include all the court officials and administrative staff. Don’t underestimate the impact a fly can make on the world.

Professor Slapper is Director of the Centre for Law at The Open University. His recent book How the Law Works is published by HarperCollins

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