An artist creates a lemon juice container that looks exactly like a lemon

‘The law,’ opined the Scottish writer Dr Arbuthnot, at a time when it was already considered clichéd to think of it as merely an ass, ‘is a bottomless pit.’

In one way, it would be good if this were true. While the author of The History of John Bull certainly intended his observation to be taken as a condemnation, it could just about be interpreted as an accolade: that its limitless depths allow the law to accommodate every kind of malefactor, from the pettiest of petty criminals to the head of state who perpetuates the most heinous war crimes. Sadly though, this has never been true and it is unlikely that it will ever become so.

But even if the law often fails to bring down the world’s most reprehensible villains, one can still admire its sheer scope. No matter how obscure or contrived a circumstance, there is almost always a statute out there somewhere that can be brought to bear on it. Take, for example, the curious case of Reckitt & Colman Ltd vs Borden Inc: a three-year court battle over a plastic lemon juice container that was every bit as bitter as its contents and which ended up setting a legal precedent.

The story begins with a man called William Alec Gibson Pugh. An art-school graduate from East Ham in London, Pugh was in his mid-twenties when he was headhunted in 1947 by a Leicestershire company called Cascelloid. Hoping to put the company at the forefront of the revolution in plastics, Cascelloid had imported a cutting-edge machine from the United States that was able to manufacture bottles by blowing plastic – only one other machine of its kind existed in the world at the time.

Using his artistic talents, Pugh began to experiment with original designs for bottles, his first being a teddy bear that contained baby powder. Later on in his career he was to fashion the famous fist-sized tomatoes that served as ketchup dispensers in cafés up and down the land. His finest hour, however, came in the 1950s when Cascelloid was approached by a company called Edward Hack Ltd. Their executives were keen to develop a novelty bottle to boost sales of their lemon juice.

According to his obituary in the Independent, Pugh carved a wooden core onto which he painstakingly stuck fresh lemon peel. Once he had the shape just right, he made a plaster mould of it. The result was a squeezy plastic lemon-juice container that was not only the size and colour of a lemon but looked exactly like a lemon (albeit one with a capped nozzle at one end) – details that were to cause something of a legal tangle decades later. Edward Hack found instant success selling its lemon juice in the plastic lemon at a shilling a time, under the brand name Hax.

Word of the innovation crossed the Atlantic, and soon several copycat plastic lemons filled with lemon juice were on sale in the United States. However, since Hax was not sold in America, there was no question of bringing legal proceedings against these companies for infringing design rights. In the meantime, Reckitt & Colman bought up Edward Hack and Hax was renamed Jif.

All went quietly onwards until the 1980s when a US firm called Borden, which sold its lemon juice in squeezy plastic lemons under the name ReaLemon, decided to start selling its product to Britain. Reckitt & Colman took exception to this and a writ was served. It was at this point that Bill Pugh’s attention to detail was suddenly recognised by the plaintiff ’s lawyers as something of a problem. The Jif lemon looked just like a natural lemon – just as it was supposed to do. It meant that there was nothing about it that made it recognisably a Reckitt & Colman-style lemon, and thus it was impossible to register as a trademark.

The case dragged on, passing up through the courts until it ended up at the House of Lords. A judgment was finally handed down in 1990, with the lords unanimously finding in favour of Reckitt & Colman.

The case is of lasting importance because of a three-part test on trademark infringement set out by Lord Oliver of Aylmerton, which has been handily summarised by Ernie Smith in the newsletter Tedium:

1. There must be an existing reputation that the public carries with the original product or design.

2. The competing product creates confusion or misrepresentation in the market, whether intentional or not.

3. There are signs that the confusion created by the competing product negatively impacts the bottom line of the original one.

As Lord Oliver succinctly put it, in his legal opinion: ‘Thus A can compete with B by copying his goods, provided that he does not do so in such a way as to suggest that his goods are those of B.’

The Law Society Gazette made a note of the case at the time: ‘Because it is a natural shape, a lemon cannot be registered as a design. But the Lords accepted that consumers were more likely to buy the lemon on account of shape rather than read the product’s label.’

All was not lost for Borden – the only thing it needed to do was change its own design sufficiently so that there was no longer any confusion between its ReaLemon and Reckitt & Colman’s Jif (since acquired by corporate leviathan Unilever) and it could carry on selling its product.

This unlikely lemon-juice war provided British jurisprudence with a landmark case that can now be referred to whenever a company is accused of passing off its brand as that of a more successful competitor. Had Bill Pugh not been a perfectionist, it may never have come to pass.

There is evidence to suggest that Pugh’s lemon had itself been preceded by a similar plastic container emanating from Italy. Therefore it’s quite possible that the law-defining plastic lemon may yet have another day in court, and go on to define another nation’s laws.