Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 2.djvu/230

 212 HABVARD LAW RBVIBW

STATUTORY CHANGES IN EMPLOYERS' LIABILITY.

NO legal principle, with a growth of less than half a century, has become more firmly fixed in the common law of to-day, than the rule that an employer, if himself without fault, is not liable to an employee injured through the negligence of a fellow-em- ployee engaged in the same general employment. This exception to the well-known doctrine of respondeat superior, although some- times considered an old one,^ was before the courts for the first time in 1837, in the celebrated case of Priestly v. Fowler, 3 M. & W. I, which, it is said, has changed the current of decisions more radically than any other reported case. Thirteen years later the above rule was again laid down in the case of Hutchinson V. The York, New Castle, and Berwick Railway Company, 5 Ex. 343, which definitely settled the law of England. The Scotch judges at first repudiated the new doctrine,^ but they were quickly overruled by the House of Lords on appeal in the two cases of the Bartonshill Coal Company v. Reid, and the Bartonshill Coal Company v. McGuire, reported in 3 McQueen, 266 and 3CK), The Irish courts have uniformly followed Priestly v. Fowler,^ and no recourse to the House of Lords has been found necessary to bring them into line.

The American law, though in harmony with the English, seems to have had an origin of its own. In 1841, Murray v. The South Carolina Railroad Company, i McM. 385, decided that a railroad company was not liable to one servant injured through the negli- gence of another servant in the same employ. Although this de- cision came a few years after Priestly v. Fowler, the latter case was cited by neither counsel nor court. It is probable, therefore, that the American court arrived at its conclusion entirely inde- pendent of the earlier English case, — a fact often lost sight of by

1 Willd, J., in Gallagher v. Piper, 16 C B. N. s. 677^ and Pollock, C. B. in Vo»e w. Lancashire and Yorkshire R. Co., 2 H. & N. 728.

Cas. 420 (1852).
 * Sword V. Cameron, i Scotch Se8s.Cas.493 (1839) ; Dixon v. Rankin, 14 Scotch Scss..

> The first case was McEnery v, Waterlord and Kilkenny R. Co., 8 Ir. C. L. R. 312 (1858).