Byrne was walking down the street when he was hit on the
head by a barrel of flour.
He testified at trial that he never saw the barrel coming
and didn't know what happened.
The barrel apparently fell out of Boadle's flour shop
next door.
At Trial, Boadle argued that there were no witnesses to
the barrel's falling, and so there was no evidence that any negligence
occurred.
Boadle argued that the only evidence that existed was circumstantial
evidence, which is generally inadmissible.
There was no evidence of an untaken precaution.
The Trial Court found for Byrne.
The Court felt that the very fact that an accident
occurred is evidence that somebody somewhere was negligent.
This line of argument is known as res ipsa loquitur.
("The thing speaks for itself")
The Court says, "It is the duty of persons who keep
barrels in a warehouse to take care that they do not roll out, and I
think that such a case would, beyond all doubt, afford prima facie
evidence of negligence. A barrel could not roll out of a warehouse
without some negligence, and to say that a plaintiff who is
injured by it must call witnesses from the warehouse to prove negligence
seems to me preposterous."
Three aspects required to use res ipsa loquitur:
The harm would not ordinarily have occurred without
someone's negligence.
The instrumentality of the harm was under the exclusive
control of the defendant at the time of the likely negligent act.
The plaintiff did not contribute to the harm by his own
negligence.
In the case of Valley Properties Limited Partnership v.
Steadman's Hardware Inc. (251 Mont. 242, 842 P.2d 250 (1992)), it was
stated that res ipsa loquitur requires that:
The event is of the kind which does not ordinarily occur
in the absence of negligence.
Other responsible causes, including the conduct of the
plaintiff or others, are sufficiently eliminated by the evidence.
The indicated negligence is within the scope of the
defendant's duty to the plaintiff.
Going back to the risk-utility formula one could
say that there was something that Boadle could have done, at some cost,
that would have prevented the accident, and the cost of that precautionary
measure would be less than the potential liability of the accident.
