Man on the Clapham omnibus

[1][2][3] The phrase was reportedly first put to legal use in a judgment by Sir Richard Henn Collins MR in the English Court of Appeal libel case McQuire v. Western Morning News (1903).

Lord Justice Greer used the phrase in Hall v. Brooklands Auto-Racing Club (1933)[7] to define the 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),[8] where Lord Reed said: 1.

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.

This appeal is concerned with one of them: the reasonably well-informed and normally diligent tenderer.The expression has also been incorporated in Canadian patent jurisprudence, notably Beloit v. Valmet Oy[9] in its discussion of the test for obviousness.