so long as it was kept in secure custody and no negligence occurred. Some scholars have nonetheless held him liable, yet the first opinion is the one most widely transmitted from Malik, and both views are acted upon according to what sound juristic reasoning dictates.
Neither a wage-worker nor a lessee is liable for anything except what their own hands have brought about—for whatever they lose, waste, or wrongfully damage—just like all other trustees.
Malik and most of his companions maintain that anyone who transports staple foodstuffs, or anything equivalent, becomes liable when he carries them alone without the owner present. Included in this is the miller at the mill: he is liable for what he conveys to the mill by himself when the owner of the grain is absent, in the same way craftsmen are held liable—an arrangement the early generations endorsed because people need their services and routinely hand goods over to them.
If such carriers can produce evidence that the food they were transporting perished, they are not liable. With regard to items other than food, liability arises only through transgression or negligence; otherwise, no liability attaches to them.
If someone is hired to carry goods on his back and the item falls and breaks, he is neither liable nor entitled to any wage. But if something drops from his hand onto the very goods he was hired to carry and breaks them, he is liable and must pay their value.
When the owner of pottery allows a prospective buyer to take an item and inspect it, and it slips from his hand without any transgression or negligence, he bears no liability. Yet if it falls from his hand onto another piece of pottery so that both pieces break, he must pay for the piece that was on the ground—because he had no permission to handle it—while he is not liable for the other.
The broker is treated in the same manner as craftsmen, although it has also been said that he is like a wage-worker. The position I prefer regarding the market criers is that they are liable for whatever merchandise they receive, unless it becomes clear that the loss occurred in their possession without negligence or treachery. There are divergent reports on this from Malik and others, and the distilled opinion of Malik’s school