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Miller moved for a new trial on the ground of misdirection. He 
cited Proctor v. Harris
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, as shewing that a plaintiff cannot 
recover for damage caused by negligence where the injury has 
been partly occasioned by negligence of his own; and he 
contended that the plaintiff here committed such fault by 
attempting to bring his horse out of the mews, if the passage 
was at all dangerous; and that, instead of incurring danger even 
if it had been slight, he should have kept his horse in the 
stable, and brought an action, if necessary, for the 
obstruction. [LORD DENMAN, C.J. I thought the plaintiff might 
be justified in incurring a moderate danger, and that the facts 
proved as to the first coming out shewed it to be no more.] ... 
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. 
4 C. & P. 337. 

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[COLERIDGE, J. If a man is lying drunk on the road, another is 
not negligently to drive over him.
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If that happened, the 
drunkenness would have made the man liable to the injury, but 
would not have occasioned the injury.] Here the plaintiff had 
an obvious danger before him, and was not justified in 
encountering it to avoid a delay. For that he might have had a 
legal remedy: if he chose rather to incur a danger, he might do 
so, but not at the cost of the defendants. If an extraordinary 
emergency had arisen, as a fire, the case might have been 
different. [PATTESON, J. Suppose the horse had been coming home; 
must he have been kept out of the stable till the entrance was 
pronounced safe?] He might have placed the horse at livery and 
brought an action for the keep.... 
COLERIDGE, J. The question is, not only whether the defendants 
did an improper act, but also whether the injury to the 
plaintiff may legally be deemed the consequence of it. The 
defendants say that injury was the result of his own 
wrongheadedness in attempting to pass when he was told that it 
could not be done without risk to his horse and to the men 
below. Then, was the question on this point properly left to the 
jury? I understand the Lord Chief Justice to have expressed 
himself strongly against the view taken by the defendants' 
counsel, but to have put the question in the manner which 
appears correct, by asking, namely, whether the plaintiff acted 
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. 
[EDITOR'S NOTE. Contrast Button v. Hudson R.R. Co. (18 N.Y. 349), where a drunken man 
was thus run over; but, from the darkness, without negligence.] 

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as a man of ordinary prudence would have done, or rashly and in 
defiance of warning. The plaintiff was not bound to abstain from 
pursuing his livelihood because there was some danger. It was 
necessary for the defendants to shew a clear danger and a 
precise warning. Whether these facts existed or not, was for the 
consideration of the jury; and, if the jury disbelieved them, 
the plaintiff was entitled to the verdict. 
[Concurring judgments were delivered by LORD DENMAN, C.J., 
PATTESON, J., and WIGHTMAN, J.] 
Rule discharged. 
[EDITOR'S NOTE. This case was followed by the Supreme Court of 
the United States, in Mosheuvel v. Columbia, (191 U.S. 247). 
Sometimes one of the two evils between which the plaintiff has 
had to make his choice may be an evil threatening not himself 
but a third person. 
Thus in Langendorff v. Pennsylvania Ry. Co. (48 Ohio 316) a 
judgment against a railway company was upheld in a case where a 
little child had been (through the company's negligence in 
having no watchman at a level crossing) imperilled by a passing 
train, and the plaintiff bravely sprang to the child's rescue 
but was struck by the engine. The company urged that the 
plaintiff had voluntarily taken on himself a risk of an 
obviously hazardous character, and one which he was under no 

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legal obligation to accept. But the court held that, though it 
was thus true that if he had chosen to stand by and permit the 
train to kill the child, he would have violated no rule of law, 
civil or criminal, yet that was not a conclusive test of the 
company's liability. "To entitle a plaintiff to relief for the 
consequences of another's negligence it is by no means necessary 
that the party injured should have been at the time in the 
discharge of a duty; his rights are perfect if he is in the 
performance of any lawful act. The act of the present plaintiff 
was not only lawful, but highly commendable; nor was he, in any 
legal sense, responsible for the emergency that called for such 
prompt decision. The negligence of the railroad company, in 
having no watchman, and in the unlawful rate of speed at which 
the train was running, were the causes of the danger. There was 
but the fraction of a minute in which to resolve and act; to 
require that a man so situated should stop and weigh the danger 
to himself, and compare it with that overhanging the person to 
be rescued, would be to deny the right of rescue altogether when 
the danger is imminent. The alarm, the excitement, and 
confusion; the uncertainty as to the proper move to be made; and 
the promptness required: all suggest that much latitude of 
judgment should be allowed to those who are thus forced by the 
strongest dictates of humanity to decide and act in sudden 
emergencies. a man is not necessarily chargeable with 
Contributory Negligence because he adopted a course of action 
that imperilled his life." Cf. Brandon v. Osborne, L.R. [1924] 
1 K.B. 548.] 

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