Reasonable Person - History

History

In 1835, Adolphe Quetelet's detailed the characteristics of l'homme moyen. His work translates into English several ways. As a result, some authors pick "average man", "common man", "reasonable man", or give up and stick to "l'homme moyen". Quetelet was a Belgian astronomer, mathematician, statistician and sociologist. He documented the physical characteristics of man on a statistical basis and discussed man's motivations when acting in society.

At the age of two, the "reasonable person" made his first appearance in the English case of Vaughan v. Menlove (1837). In Menlove, the defendant had stacked hay on his rental property in a manner prone to spontaneous ignition. After he had been repeatedly warned over the course of five weeks, the hay ignited and burned the defendant's barns and stable, and then spread to the landlord's two cottages on the adjacent property. Menlove's attorney admitted his client's "misfortune of not possessing the highest order of intelligence," arguing that negligence should only be found if the jury decided Menlove had not acted with "bona fide to the best of his judgment."

The Menlove court disagreed, reasoning that such a standard would be too subjective, instead preferring to set an objective standard by which to adjudicate cases:

The care taken by a prudent man has always been the rule laid down; and as to the supposed difficulty of applying it, a jury has always been able to say, whether, taking that rule as their guide, there has been negligence on the occasion in question. Instead, therefore, of saying that the liability for negligence should be co-extensive with the judgment of each individual, which would be as variable as the length of the foot of each individual, we ought rather to adhere to the rule which requires in all cases a regard to caution such as a man of ordinary prudence would observe. That was, in substance, the criterion presented to the jury in this case and, therefore, the present rule must be discharged.

English courts upheld the standard again nearly 20 years later in Blyth v. Company Proprietors of the Birmingham Water Works, holding:

Negligence is the omission to do something which a reasonable man, guided upon those considerations which ordinarily regulate the conduct of human affairs, would do, or doing something which a prudent and reasonable man would not do.