Res Ipsa Loquitur is a fun doctrine. It literally translates as “the thing speaks for itself.” But as I always ask my students tongue in cheek, if it speaks for itself, why does it do so in a foreign language? Why can't it tell us what it speaks? Res Ipsa Loquitur is essentially a rule of evidence. And so the classic case for res ipsa is called Byrne versus Boadle. It's an English case. It's one of those, remembering that there is a real person who's getting injured, but it seems like one of those funny cases where our plaintiff just walks around on the streets in England, merry old England, and just looks up, and out of nowhere a barrel of flour falls on his head out of a shop that's on the second story of this building that sells flour. Plaintiff sues the shop owner and he says: look, I have damages, and you have duty to keep your flour safe because a reasonable shopkeep would not allow barrels to roll around on his shop floor. But what he's failing to show is that it's like: I don't know what happened because, you know, I was all the way down on the street. I was not in the shop. And the shop owner said, well then how do you know that I breached my duty? For all you know maybe it's a customer who mishandled the barrel of flour. Maybe it's somebody who kicked the flour. You know, maybe it was secure, but somebody actually came there with a knife and cut the line, and that's how it fell out. How do you know I wasn't acting reasonably? You fail to show that I breached my duty. Yeah, I agree. I have a duty to secure my flour.. You have no evidence that I breached my duty. And the court says: the fact that the flour barrel fell out of a second story window kind of speaks for itself. It said: what do we know from our everyday human experience? We know that things generally don't fall out of second story windows unless somebody either throws them or is not careful about securing them. So if things fall out, somebody somewhere screwed up. And now the only question is, well, who knows better who screwed up? Is it the shop owner and his employees? Or is it the poor guy who was down there on the street. And the court said: well, obviously the person who's in control of the flour knows better. They can explain what happened. And to the extent they can't explain, we are okay saying that it's their fault because after all it's their shop, they're in control. Now again, is it possible that, for example, at that very moment, a bunch of, you know, hooligans broke into the shop and started throwing things out on the street. Of course, it's possible. Does it make a shop owner liable? Of course not. And so we're willing to listen to explanations that it's really not his fault, that he was not unreasonable. But res ipsa says as a default, absent that explanation, the thing speaks for itself. The fact that barrel flour fell out of a second story window speaks for itself, that somebody screwed up and who's the most likely to have screwed up? The person who owns the shop.