Supreme Court judge Mr Justice Ronan Keane treated the Leinster Society of Chartered Accountants to a hitlist of groundbreaking legal cases when speaking at a lunch this week.

Amongst the list was "the most important case" of William Jefferson Clinton and Paula Jones. Mr Justice Keane noted that this laid down the principle that a president could be the subject of a civil law suit whilst acting in office.

However the "Daddy of them all" (law suits that is) was the intriguing case of Donoghue v Stevenson in 1929. As all good law students will know, this battle over the discovery of a decomposed snail in a bottle of ginger beer established a precedent on which the law of negligence is now based.

The joys of jurisprudence.