Can cricket be a nuisance? How a judge’s review greenlighted the game

judgement day

This is about a case in a domain of law that is close to the people, to their everyday problems – tort law. Tort law is concerned with issues many face in their daily lives. One person starts a noisy eatery close to a doctor’s practice. Another person drives his car carelessly down a one-way street. The first case is a nuisance, the second one is negligence. The law grows organically while dealing with these problems. It’s almost incongruent to call it the law, which denotes something artificial. It’s law as common sense.

When students come to law school, we start them off on a menu of tort law. They don’t see law as something imposed from above, but something as natural as life. A famous case in tort law, titled Donoghue v Stevenson, concerned a dead snail in a bottle of ginger beer. The customer sued the manufacturer who denied liability because he had no relationship, personal or commercial, with the customer. The judge in this case imposed a liability on the manufacturer under the ‘neighbourhood principle’ i.e., we owe duties to our neighbours because we share each others’ fates, even if we are thousands of miles from each other.

The case I am writing about today is an old case from the nineteen-seventies. A cricket club in England played its cricket on the village greens. Many years later, a housing development came up on the edges of the cricket ground. Then the trouble started. As you might be aware from your playing days, cricket balls tend to land up in house gardens or disturb the upstairs windows a little bit. Some of the club players made it a habit to visit the house asking for the return of their cricket balls. One of the residents didn’t like it. In India, we might have had a brawl and be done with it. In England, the dispute ended in the courts, as a case of nuisance, cricket being the cause. The case came to be known as Miller v Jackson.

The court at the first instance granted the resident’s request for an injunction-in effect preventing the club from playing cricket. The cricket club went up in appeal. The appeal went before a panel one of whom was a celebrated English judge, Lord Denning – he had a discursive literary style that he brought to virtually all his judgements. Here’s an abridged version of the introductory part of his judgement:

In the village of Lintz in County Durham they have their own cricket ground, where they have played these last 70 years. Yet now, a High Court judge has ordered that they must not play there anymore. He has done it at the instance of a newcomer who is no lover of cricket. This newcomer has built a house on the edge of the ground which four years ago was a field where cattle grazed. Now he complains that, when a batsman hits a six, the ball has been known to land on or near his house. He has asked the judge to stop the cricket. And the judge, much against his will, has felt that he must order the cricket to be stopped; with the consequences, I suppose, that the Lintz Cricket Club will disappear. The cricket ground will be turned to some other use. The young men will turn to other things instead of cricket. The whole village will be much poorer. And all this because of a newcomer who bought a house next to the cricket ground.

You will see that Lord Denning has signposted his decision already. He didn’t think the cricket club was being a nuisance at all. He dissented from his fellow judges on the panel, who were inclined to think that the cricket being played so close to the house was indeed a bit of a nuisance. Ultimately, the panel declined to impose an injunction stopping the cricket club from playing cricket.

I like to discuss this case with cricket lovers, my students, and whoever else cares to listen, to make them understand how tort law is so close to how people behave in real life. Lord Denning was a cricket lover. He was also a traditionalist, soaked in the rhythms and rhymes of English country life. He was culturally attuned to be suspicious of cricket heathens who spoke disparagingly of the game. That cricket could be a nuisance would probably never occur to him. The controversies in the law are not of the law alone. What’s a nuisance to one is a pleasure for another. Law has to manage these contradictions because outside the law, these contradictions persist. Judges might want to remain neutral but they are also humans and sometimes, cricket lovers.