Libby, McNeill & Libby v. Scherman

Citations

• 146 Ill. 540
• 34 N.E. 801

Syllabus

<p>1. Negligence—sufficiency of declaration against a corporation. In an action by a servant against a corporation, his master, to recover for a personal injury caused by negligence, the declaration need not show affirmatively, by express averments, that the injury complained of was caused by the negligent act of agents or servants of the defendant who were not fellow-servants of the plaintiff. The allegation that the defendant,—that is, the corporation itself,—negligently did the acts complained of, excludes, ex vi termini, the theory that they were performed by parties for whose conduct the defendant was not responsible.</p> <p>2. This case is clearly distinguishable from Joliet Steel Co. v. Shields, 134 Ill. 109. In that case the negligent acts complained of were affirmatively alleged to have been done by the defendant’s servants, without showing that they were done by the class of servants whose acts would charge the principal with responsibility, while here the corporation itself was charged with the act of negligence.</p> <p>3. Same—evidence—experiments of witnesses, and their opinions. In an action to recover for a personal injury caused by negligence in taking out the contents of a barrel, leaving others above the same in a pile, whereby the barrels above fell, and one of them fell on the plaintiff, the defendant offered to prove by witnesses their experiments with piles of barrels similar to the one from which the barrels fell on plaintiff, and that a barrel located relatively the same as the empty barrel in question was entirely taken out without causing the pile to fall. The witnesses were also asked whether a barrel, located as was the one in question, could be taken out of the pile without causing it to fall or give way, or whether knocking out the head of the barrel thus situated, and removing the contents, would affect the stability of the pile: Held, that the evidence was not admissible, as the experiments, and the results and inferences shown from t