Editing Man on the Clapham omnibus (section)

==History==
The phrase was reportedly first put to legal use in a judgment by Sir [[Richard Henn Collins]] [[Master of the Rolls|MR]] in the English Court of Appeal libel case ''McQuire v. [[Western Morning News]]'' (1903).<ref name="SLLLT">''McQuire v Western Morning News'' [1903] 2 {{abbr|K.B.|King's Bench}} 100 at 109 per Collins MR.</ref> He attributed the phrase to [[Charles Bowen, Baron Bowen|Lord Bowen]]<ref name="DWuOU">{{Citation |editor-last=Room |editor-first=Richard |year=1996 |title=Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable |edition=15th |publisher=Cassell |page=[https://archive.org/details/brewersdictionar00room_0/page/761 761] |isbn=0062701339 |url-access=registration |url=https://archive.org/details/brewersdictionar00room_0/page/761}}</ref> and used it in a negative sense:
{{quote|One thing, however, is perfectly clear, and that is that the jury have no right to substitute their own opinion of the literary merits of the work for that of the critic, or to try the "fairness" of the criticism by any such standard. "Fair," therefore, in this collocation certainly does not mean that which the ordinary reasonable man, "the man on the Clapham omnibus," as [[Charles Bowen, Baron Bowen|Lord Bowen]] phrased it, the juryman common or special, would think a correct appreciation of the work; and it is of the highest importance to the community that the critic should be saved from any such possibility.
}}

It may be derived from the phrase "Public opinion ... is the opinion of the bald-headed man at the back of the omnibus",<ref name="60c9Z">{{Citation |last=Bagehot |first=Walter |author-link=Walter Bagehot |year=1873 |orig-year=1867 |title=The English Constitution |publisher=Little, Brown, and co |pages=325–326 |url=https://archive.org/details/englishconstitu00bagegoog}}</ref> a description by the 19th-century journalist [[Walter Bagehot]] of a normal London man. [[Clapham]], in [[South London]], was at the time a nondescript [[commuting|commuter]] suburb seen to represent "ordinary" London, and in the 19th century would have been served by [[horsebus|horse-drawn omnibuses]].

[[Frederick Greer, 1st Baron Fairfield|Lord Justice Greer]] used the phrase in ''Hall v. [[Brooklands]] Auto-Racing Club'' (1933)<ref name="EWDMJ">''Hall v Brooklands Auto-Racing Club'' [1933] 1 {{abbr|K.B.|King's Bench}} 205.</ref> to define the [[Standard of care in English law|standard of care]] a defendant must live up to in order to avoid being found negligent.

The use of the phrase was reviewed by the UK Supreme Court in ''Healthcare at Home Limited v. The [[Common Services Agency]]'' (2014),<ref name="BksIt">{{cite BAILII |litigants=Healthcare at Home Limited v. The Common Services Agency |year=2014 |court=UKSC |num=49 |pinpoint=[1]-[4]}}</ref> where [[Robert Reed, Lord Reed|Lord Reed]] said:
{{quote|1. The Clapham omnibus has many passengers. The most venerable is the reasonable man, who was born during the reign of Victoria but remains in vigorous health. Amongst the other passengers are the right-thinking member of society, familiar from the law of defamation, the [[officious bystander]], the reasonable parent, the reasonable landlord, and the fair-minded and informed observer, all of whom have had season tickets for many years.

2. The horse-drawn bus between Knightsbridge and Clapham, which Lord Bowen is thought to have had in mind, was real enough. But its most famous passenger, and the others I have mentioned, are [[legal fictions]]. They belong to an intellectual tradition of defining a legal standard by reference to a hypothetical person, which stretches back to the creation by Roman jurists of the figure of the ''[[bonus paterfamilias]]''...

3. It follows from the nature of the reasonable man, as a means of describing a standard applied by the court, that it would be misconceived for a party to seek to lead evidence from actual passengers on the Clapham omnibus as to how they would have acted in a given situation or what they would have foreseen, to establish how the reasonable man would have acted or what he would have foreseen. Even if the party offered to prove that his witnesses were reasonable men, the evidence would be beside the point. The behaviour of the reasonable man is not established by the evidence of witnesses, but by the application of a legal standard by the court. The court may require to be informed by evidence of circumstances which bear on its application of the standard of the reasonable man in any particular case; but it is then for the court to determine the outcome, in those circumstances, of applying that impersonal standard.

4. In recent times, some additional passengers from the European Union have boarded the Clapham omnibus. This appeal is concerned with one of them: the reasonably well-informed and normally diligent tenderer.}}