ABSTRACT
Lord Abinger CB: Looking at these things according to common sense, we should consider what is the substantive fact to be made out, and on whom it lies to make it out. It is not so much the form of the issue which ought to be considered, as the substance and effect of it. In many cases, a party, by a little difference in the drawing of his pleadings, might make it either affirmative or negative, as he pleased. The plaintiff here says, ‘You did not repair’; he might have said, ‘You let the house become dilapidated’. I shall endeavour by my own view to arrive at the substance of the issue, and I think in the present case that the plaintiff’s counsel should begin.4
