difficulty of applying it, a jury has always been able to say, whether, taking that rule as their guide, there has been negligence...."). Significance The defense counsel had argued that there was no duty imposed on the defendant to be responsible for the exercise of any given degree of care, in contrast to the duty of care imposed on common carriers and bailees, or under an implied contract. This case was decided during a transitional period in the history of the common law rule on negligence and liability. Until the mid- to late 19th century in the United States and England, there was no settled standard for tort liability. Courts in the early 19th century often found a negligence requirement for liability to exist only for common carriers or bailees. English and U.S. courts later began to move toward a standard of negligence based on a universal duty of care in light of the "reasonable person" test. Vaughan v. Menlove is often cited as the seminal case which introduced the “reasonable person” test not only to the tort law, but to jurisprudence generally. This assertion is false. A 2019 law review article discovered that the misidentification of Vaughan v. Menlove as the birthplace of the “reasonable man of ordinary prudence” originated from a typographical error in an influential tort treatise, Prosser’s Law of Torts (4th edition), which erroneously cites the date of the case as “1738” rather than “1837.” Although no cases earlier than 1738 were found to apply a reasonable person standard, there exist several cases prior to 1837 applying the reasonable person standard. The error was corrected after the fourth edition of Prosser’s treatise, however subsequent legal scholars have continued to repeat the claim that Vaughan v. Menlove is where the “reasonable person” concept first appeared in the law, as the misattribution propagates indirectly through a citation network. See also English tort law Notes 1837 in case law English tort case law 1837 in British law Court of Common Pleas (England) cases