Frank Douglas Mac Kinnon - Lord Justice of Appeal

Lord Justice of Appeal

In 1937, MacKinnon was elevated to the Court of Appeal and sworn in to the Privy Council. A pragmatist, he may have had a greater impact had he not felt so impatient as to never reserve judgment. He was considered for the House of Lords in 1938 but Samuel Porter, Baron Porter was preferred.

He was one of those judges who, on occasion, causes amusement through their unfamiliarity with popular culture. In a notorious libel trial in 1943, the court was viewing a photograph from the magazine Lilliput showing a well-known male fashion designer juxtaposed next to a pansy. MacKinnon had to ask Rayner Goddard, Baron Goddard to explain the innuendo. Towards the end of his life he confessed to neither owning nor intending to own a "wiresless set".

He also gained some notoriety for doubting the grounds of the leading negligence case of Donoghue v. Stevenson. About the case, which involved a snail in a bottle of ginger beer, MacKinninon said, in his 1942 Holdsworth lecture:

I detest that snail ... when the law had been settled by the House of Lords, the case went back to Edinburgh to be tried on the facts. And at that trial it was found that there never was a snail in the bottle at all! That intruding gasterpod was as much a legal fiction as the Casual Ejector.

Lord Normand, the defendant's advocate, always insisted that MacKinnon's allegation was untrue.