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The law reports are full of dry disputes about tax, land and procedure. Occasionally, though, a case arrives with facts so strange that generations of students remember it. Here are five whose oddity is matched only by their importance.

1. The Smoke Ball That Made Contract Law: Carlill v Carbolic Smoke Ball Co (1893)

In the influenza epidemic of the early 1890s, the Carbolic Smoke Ball Company advertised a rubber ball filled with carbolic acid powder, to be inhaled through the nose. It promised to pay £100 to anyone who used the ball as directed three times a day for two weeks and still caught influenza. To show its sincerity, it announced that £1,000 had been deposited with the Alliance Bank in Regent Street.

Mrs Louisa Carlill used the ball as directed and caught influenza. The company refused to pay, arguing that an advertisement was mere puff, that there was no contract with the world at large, and that Mrs Carlill had never communicated her acceptance. The Court of Appeal disagreed on every point. An advertisement can be an offer to the whole world; the deposit showed it was serious; and performing the conditions was acceptance enough. The case remains the foundation of the law on unilateral contracts, and the smoke ball’s inventor went on to advertise the case itself.

2. The Shipwreck and the Cabin Boy: R v Dudley and Stephens (1884)

In 1884, the yacht Mignonette sank in the South Atlantic. Four crew members escaped in a small boat with two tins of turnips. After nineteen days without food and with the cabin boy, Richard Parker, aged seventeen, unconscious and near death, Tom Dudley and Edwin Stephens killed him. The three survivors ate his body and were rescued four days later.

Dudley and Stephens were tried for murder and argued necessity: without the killing, all four would have died. Lord Coleridge, the Lord Chief Justice, rejected the defence. Necessity, he held, cannot justify the deliberate killing of an innocent person; if it could, who would decide whose life was worth less? The two men were sentenced to death, and the sentence was commuted to six months’ imprisonment. The case is still the leading authority that necessity is no defence to murder.

3. The Fighter Jet for Pepsi Points: Leonard v Pepsico (1999)

In 1995, Pepsi ran a television advertisement for its Pepsi Points loyalty scheme. It showed a teenager arriving at school in a Harrier military jump jet, with the caption “7,000,000 Pepsi Points”. John Leonard, a business student, read the scheme’s rules, discovered that points could be bought for ten cents each, and sent Pepsi a cheque for $700,008.50 with an order form for one Harrier jet.

Pepsi declined. Leonard sued. Judge Kimba Wood of the federal court in New York held that no reasonable person could have thought the advertisement was a serious offer; the jet was obviously a joke, the scheme’s catalogue did not list it, and in any event a contract for a military aircraft would need to be in writing. The judgment is a standard illustration of the objective test of contractual intention.

4. Suing the Devil: Mayo v Satan and His Staff (1971)

Gerald Mayo, a prisoner in Pennsylvania, filed a civil rights claim in the federal court alleging that Satan and his staff had on many occasions caused him misery, placed obstacles in his path and brought about his downfall. He asked to proceed without paying court fees.

Judge Gerald Weber’s short opinion took the claim at face value. He noted that there was doubt whether the court had jurisdiction over the defendant, who was not shown to reside in the district; that an unofficial account of a New Hampshire trial suggested the defendant might be a foreign prince, raising questions of immunity; that the plaintiff might not adequately represent the class of all those similarly harmed; and, decisively, that he had provided no instructions for serving the defendant with the papers. The case was dismissed.

5. Is a Tomato a Vegetable? Nix v Hedden (1893)

The Tariff Act of 1883 imposed a duty on imported vegetables but not on fruit. The Nix family, importers in New York, argued that tomatoes were botanically fruit and therefore duty-free. The Collector of the Port disagreed and taxed them.

The US Supreme Court held unanimously for the Collector. Justice Gray accepted that the tomato is, to a botanist, a fruit. But tariff laws, he said, use words in their ordinary meaning, and in the common language of the people, and at the dinner table, tomatoes are vegetables served with the main course, not as dessert.

Why They Matter

Each of these cases is remembered because it is strange, and taught because it is right. Carlill explains when an advertisement binds. Dudley and Stephens marks the limit of necessity. Leonard shows how courts read intention. Mayo teaches procedure through absurdity. And Nix v Hedden reminds every student that words in statutes mean what ordinary people mean by them.

Sources

1. Wikipedia, Carlill v Carbolic Smoke Ball Co: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlill_v_Carbolic_Smoke_Ball_Co
2. Wikipedia, R v Dudley and Stephens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Dudley_and_Stephens
3. Wikipedia, Leonard v Pepsico, Inc.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_v._Pepsico,_Inc.
4. Wikipedia, United States ex rel. Gerald Mayo v Satan and His Staff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_ex_rel._Gerald_Mayo_v._Satan_and_His_Staff
5. Wikipedia, Nix v Hedden: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nix_v._Hedden