Product liability is a jurisdiction where producers, distributors, suppliers, retailers, and others who make products available to the public are responsible for the injury caused by the product. Although the word "product" has a broad connotation, product responsibility as a jurisdiction is traditionally limited to products in the form of real personal property.
Video Product liability
Product responsibility in United States
The theory of responsibility
In the United States, claims most often associated with product liability are omissions, strict liability, breaches of warranty, and various consumer protection claims. The majority of product liability laws are defined at the state level and vary greatly from state to state. Each type of product liability claim requires evidence of various elements to present a valid claim.
Type of obligation
Part 2 of Torts: Third Response of Torts: Product Liability distinguishes between three main types of product liability claims:
- Factory malfunction
- Design flaw
- Failure to warn (also known as marketing flaw)
However, in most countries, this is not a legal claim within and of themselves, but is pleaded in terms of the theories mentioned above. For example, a plaintiff might invoke a default failure to warn or strict responsibility for a damaged design.
- Manufacturing defects are what happens in the manufacturing process and usually involve low quality materials or poor workmanship.
- Design defects occur where the product design is essentially harmful or useless (and hence corrupted) no matter how carefully manufactured; this can be demonstrated by showing that the product fails to meet the expectations of ordinary consumers like what constitutes a safe product, or that the risk of a product outweighs its benefits.
- The failure to warn errors appears in products that carry an inherent inherent danger. This can be mitigated through adequate warning to the user, and this danger exists regardless of how well the product is manufactured and designed for the intended purpose. This also includes failing to provide relevant product or product warnings.
Security violation
Warranties are statements by the manufacturer or seller about the product during a commercial transaction. Warranty claims usually require privatity between the injured party with the manufacturer or the seller; in plain English, this means they have to deal with each other directly. Breach of a warranty-based product liability claim typically focuses on one of three types: (1) breach of implied warranties, (2) implied sales guarantees, and (3) implied fitness guarantee for the purpose. In addition, claims involving real estate may also be implied warranties of eligibility. Express warranty claims focus on express statements by manufacturers or product related sellers (eg, "This saw is useful for cutting turkey"). The implied warranties include general expectations for all products (for example, that a device is harmless if used for the right purpose), unless specifically not recognized by the manufacturer or seller.
Negligence
Claims of basic negligence consist of evidence
- liability for liability,
- violation of the assignment,
- violation is the true cause of the plaintiff's injury (the real cause)
- The surrounding violation causes the plaintiff's injury.
- and the complainant suffers from tangible measurable injuries (damages).
As indicated in cases like Winterbottom v. Wright , the scope of maintenance task is limited to those with privileges. Subsequent cases such as MacPherson v. Buick Motor Co. expands the maintenance obligation for all that can be harmed by one's behavior.
Over time, the concept of omission has arisen to deal with certain specific situations, including negligence per se (using manufacturer's violation of laws or regulations, substituting for evidence of duty and offense) and loquitur's res-ipsa (a conclusion of negligence in certain conditions).
Strict responsibility
Rather than focusing on the manufacturer's behavior (as in negligence), the strict liability claim focuses on the product itself. With strict responsibility, the manufacturer is responsible if the product is damaged, even if the manufacturer is not negligent in making the product defective.
The difficulty with negligence is that it still requires the plaintiff to prove that the defendant's behavior is below the relevant treatment standard. However, if the entire industry is secretly setting behavior standards that are somewhat reckless (ie, as analyzed from a layman's perspective), then the plaintiff may not be able to recover even if he is seriously injured, because even though the defendant's actions result in < , such an act is not negligent in the legal sense (if everyone in the trade would inevitably testify that the defendant's behavior corresponds to the reasonable behavior of the trader in such circumstances). As a practical matter, with the increasing complexity of products, injuries, and medical treatments (which made many previously wounded victims), it is a quite difficult and costly task to find and retain good expert witnesses who can set standards of care, abuse and cause.
Therefore, in the 1940s and 1950s, many American courts set out from MacPherson's standards and decided that it was too harsh to ask a severely injured consumer plaintiff to prove a negligence claim against the producer or the retailer. To avoid such plaintiffs' refusals, these courts began to look for facts in their cases that they could describe as express or implied warranties from producers to consumers. Doctrine res ipsa loquitur is also stretched to reduce the burden of proof. Over time, the resulting legal fictions became increasingly tense.
From various US states, California was the first to throw off the warranty fiction and boldly affirmed the doctrine of strict liability in the lawsuit for defective products, in a California Supreme Court decision at Greenman v. Yuba Power Products , 59 Cal. 2d 57 (1963) (where majority opinion was composed by then - Associate Justice Roger J. Traynor). The importance of Greenman can not be overstated: in 1996, the American Trial Lawyers Association (now known as the American Association of Justice) celebrated its 50th anniversary by polling lawyers and law professors on the top ten developments in law lawsuits over the past half century, and Greenman topped the list.
In Greenman , Traynor quotes his or her own concurring opinion at Escola v. Coca-Cola Bottling Co. , 24 Cal. 2d 453, 462 (1944) (Traynor, J., concurring). At Escola , now widely acknowledged as an important case in American law, Justice Traynor laid the groundwork for Greenman with these words:
Even if there is no negligence, however, public policy requires established responsibilities everywhere to effectively reduce the dangers to life and health inherent in defective products that reach the market. It is clear that manufacturers can anticipate some danger and keep others from recurring, because society can not. Those who suffer injuries from defective products are not prepared to meet the consequences. The cost of injury and loss of time or health can be a tremendous harm to the wounded, and unnecessarily, because the risk of injury can be insured by the manufacturer and distributed among the public as the cost of doing business. It is in the public interest to prevent the marketing of defective products that pose a threat to the public. If those products continue to find their way to the market, it is in the public interest to place responsibility for any injuries they may inflict on the manufacturer, who, even if he is not negligent in the manufacture of the product, is responsible for his or her accomplishment. market. But intermittently as injuries can occur and however haphazard they may strike, their risk of occurrence is a constant and common risk. To such risks, there shall be general and constant protection and the manufacturer shall provide such protection.
A year after Greenman , the California Supreme Court proceeded to extend strict obligations to all parties involved in the manufacture, distribution and sale of defective products (including retailers) and in 1969 confirmed that the defendant as it is responsible not only to direct customers and users, but also to any innocent person who is injured randomly by a defective product.
Since then, many jurisdictions have been affected by Justice Traynor's argument in the name of strict liability rules in Escola , Greenman , and subsequent cases. In the 40 years after Greenman , the highest court in almost all US states and territories followed the example of California in imposing strict obligations on manufacturers, distributors and retailers for defective products. In an important decision of 1986, the US Supreme Court took on strict responsibility for defective products by adopting it as part of federal admiralty law.
Meanwhile, although Greenman's rules are transmitted to most other states through Section 402A of Torts Return Statement, Second (published in 1964 after Greenman ), the California Supreme Court refused to adopted the "no-nonsense dangerous" restriction of Section 402A of strict responsibility in 1972. Thus, strict liability in California is strictly enforceable, as the plaintiff does not necessarily suggest that the defect is unreasonable or dangerous. On the other hand, in California, the defendant is allowed to introduce evidence in the strict product liability action that the plaintiff contributed to his own injuries.
Although the California Supreme Court has since become more conservative, it continues to support and extend the doctrine. In 2002 it was held that strict liability for defective products even applies to makers of component products that are installed and sold as part of real property. However, strict liability is endless. In 2012, the Court ruled that producers are responsible for strict liability and negligence only for defects in their products, which are differentiated from other products that are potentially used with their products.
Consumer protection
In addition to the above general legal claims, many countries have enacted consumer protection laws that provide customized solutions for various product defects. Legal drugs are often given for defects that simply make the product unusable (and hence cause economic injury) but do not cause physical injury or damage to other properties; "economic loss rules" mean that strict liability is generally not available for products that only damage themselves. The best examples of consumer protection legislation for product defects are the lemon laws, which become widespread because cars are often the second largest investment of Americans after buying a home.
Maps Product liability
Product liability outside the United States
In other parts of the world, the legislature leads in establishing strict liability for defective products. Judges from several countries rejected attempts by creative lawyers to persuade them to adopt Greenman holds, including Canada and South Africa.
In Europe, the movement toward strict accountability began with the Council of Europe Convention on Product Liability in connection with Personal Injury and Death (Strasbourg Convention) in 1977. On 25 July 1985, the European Economic Community adopted the Product Liability Guidelines. In a language similar to Traynor's, the Directive states that "faultless accountability on the part of producers is the only way to solve the problem adequately, especially for our increasingly technical age, from a reasonable share of risks in the production of modern technology." , The Directive also grants each member of the country of choice to impose a liability limit of 70 million euros per defect. The instructions only impose strict obligations on producers or importers, and deviate significantly from the US model by refusing to impose strict obligations on pure domestic distributors or retailers.
The legislative bodies of many other countries outside the EEC then impose a strict regime of responsibility under the European model (ie, generally applicable only to producers and importers), including Israel (March 1980, based on the proposed initial draft of the Directive), Brazil (September 1990 ), Canada (October 1992), Switzerland (December 1992), Argentina (October 1993), Japan (June 1994), Taiwan (June 1994), Malaysia (August 1999) South Korea (January 2000), Thailand (December 2007), and South Africa (April 2009).
China first imposed a Product Quality Act in October 1993 in an attempt to impose strict obligations, but the law was poorly drafted and weak. After numerous product scandals throughout the 2000s, China finally enacted a stronger Li Insurance Act in December 2009, followed by the Statute on Substantive Choice of Laws in Civil Relation Related to Foreign Relations in April 2011, enabling Chinese consumers injured by foreign-made products to request that the Chinese court apply the law of the defendant's business. Although both of these laws are still relatively ineffective against large Chinese manufacturers who are state-owned enterprises (because defendants can easily have defective products declared state secrets and then have plaintiffs prosecuted for revealing state secrets), they will allow Chinese consumers to seek compensation from non-state companies as well as foreign manufacturers.
Rationale for and debate on strict liability
The strict product liability causes manufacturers to internalize the costs they are usually externalized. Strict responsibilities require manufacturers to evaluate the full cost of their products. In this way, strict accountability provides a mechanism to ensure that a good product absolutely exceeds its absolute disadvantage.
Between two non-negligent parties (producers and consumers), a person will always bear the cost of defective products. Proponents say that it's better to put the economic costs on the producers because it can absorb them better and pass them on to other consumers. Manufacturers thus become de facto insurance companies against defective products, with premiums built into the price of the product.
Tight responsibilities also seek to reduce the impact of information asymmetry between producers and consumers. Manufacturers have a better knowledge of the dangers of their own products than consumers. Therefore, the right producer bears the burden of seeking, repairing, and alerting consumers to the danger.
Strict responsibility reduces litigation costs, as plaintiffs only need to prove cause and effect, not carelessness. If the causes are easily formed, the parties with very strict obligations are likely to be satisfied, as only the damage is debatable.
Critics allege that strict responsibility creates a risk of moral hazard. They claim that strict liability causes consumers to invest less in care even when they are the lowest cost-averse. This, they say, results in lower aggregate treatment levels than below standard negligence. Proponents argue that people have enough natural incentives to avoid causing serious harm to themselves to alleviate this concern.
Critics allege that producers who need to internalize their costs will otherwise externalize increasing the price of goods. Critics claim that in an elastic and price-sensitive market, price increases cause some consumers to find a replacement for the product. As a result, they say, producers may not produce socially optimal levels of goods. Proponents respond that this consumer disagreement reflects a product whose absolute damage exceeds its absolute value; products that are more harmful than good should not be produced.
In the legal and economic literature, there is a debate about whether obligations and regulations are substitutes or supplements. If they are substitutes, then either obligations or rules should be used. If they complement, then the joint use of obligations and regulations is optimal.
See also
- Asbestos and law
- Car product liability
- Consumer Product Safety Commission (USA)
- Consumer protection
- Donoghue v Stevenson - Scottish slug case
- Market share obligations - US.
- McDonald's coffee box - US.
- Product recall
- Statute of limits
- Summer v. Tice
- Tort Reform
- Toxic tort
- Tombstone mentality
- Wyeth v. Levine
References
External links
- Congressional Research Service (CRS) Report on Product Liability
- Product Liability Forum - International and Comparative Law Institute of England
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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