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Product liability
Product liability is the area of law in which manufacturers, distributors, suppliers, retailers, and others who make products available to the public are held responsible for the injuries those products cause. Although the word "product" has broad connotations, product liability as an area of law is traditionally limited to products in the form of tangible personal property.
The overwhelming majority of countries have strongly preferred to address product liability through legislative means. In most countries, this occurred either by enacting a separate product liability act, adding product liability rules to an existing civil code, or including strict liability within a comprehensive Consumer Protection Act. In the United States, product liability law was developed primarily through case law from state courts as well as the Restatements of the Law produced by the American Law Institute (ALI).
The United States and the European Union's product liability regimes are the two leading models for how to impose strict liability for defective products, meaning that "[v]irtually every product liability regime in the world follows one of these two models."
The United States was the birthplace of modern product liability law during the 20th century, due to the 1963 Greenman decision which led to the emergence of product liability as a distinct field of private law. In 1993, it was reported that "[n]o other country can match the United States for the number and diversity of its product liability cases, nor for the prominence of the subject in the eyes of the general public and legal practitioners." This was still true as of 2015: "In the United States, product liability continues to play a big role: litigation is much more frequent there than anywhere else in the world, awards are higher, and publicity is significant."
In the United States, the majority of product liability laws are determined at the state level and vary widely from state to state. Each type of product liability claim requires proof of different elements in order to present a valid claim.
For a variety of complex historical reasons beyond the scope of this article, personal injury lawsuits in tort for monetary damages were virtually nonexistent before the Second Industrial Revolution of the 19th century. As a subset of personal injury cases, product liability cases were extraordinarily rare, but it appears that in the few that were brought, the general rule at early common law was probably what modern observers would call no-fault or strict liability. In other words, the plaintiff only needed to prove causation and damages.
Common law courts began to shift towards a no-liability regime for products (except for cases of fraud or breach of express warranty) by developing the doctrine of caveat emptor (buyer beware) in the early 1600s. As personal injury and product liability claims began to slowly increase during the early First Industrial Revolution (due to increased mobility of both people and products), common law courts in both England and the United States in the 1840s erected further barriers to plaintiffs by requiring them to prove negligence on the part of the defendant (i.e., that the defendant was at fault because its conduct had failed to meet the standard of care expected of a reasonable person), and to overcome the defense of lack of privity of contract in cases where the plaintiff had not dealt directly with the manufacturer (as exemplified by Winterbottom v. Wright (1842)). During the Second Industrial Revolution of the mid-to-late 19th century, consumers increasingly became several steps removed from the original manufacturers of products and the unjust effects of all these doctrines became widely evident.
State courts in the United States began to look for ways to ameliorate the harsh effects of such legal doctrines, as did the British Parliament. For example, one method was to find implied warranties implicit in the nature of certain contracts; by the end of the 19th century, enough U.S. states had adopted an implied warranty of merchantable quality that this warranty was restated in statutory form in the U.S. Uniform Sales Act of 1906, which drew inspiration from the British Sale of Goods Act 1893.
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Product liability
Product liability is the area of law in which manufacturers, distributors, suppliers, retailers, and others who make products available to the public are held responsible for the injuries those products cause. Although the word "product" has broad connotations, product liability as an area of law is traditionally limited to products in the form of tangible personal property.
The overwhelming majority of countries have strongly preferred to address product liability through legislative means. In most countries, this occurred either by enacting a separate product liability act, adding product liability rules to an existing civil code, or including strict liability within a comprehensive Consumer Protection Act. In the United States, product liability law was developed primarily through case law from state courts as well as the Restatements of the Law produced by the American Law Institute (ALI).
The United States and the European Union's product liability regimes are the two leading models for how to impose strict liability for defective products, meaning that "[v]irtually every product liability regime in the world follows one of these two models."
The United States was the birthplace of modern product liability law during the 20th century, due to the 1963 Greenman decision which led to the emergence of product liability as a distinct field of private law. In 1993, it was reported that "[n]o other country can match the United States for the number and diversity of its product liability cases, nor for the prominence of the subject in the eyes of the general public and legal practitioners." This was still true as of 2015: "In the United States, product liability continues to play a big role: litigation is much more frequent there than anywhere else in the world, awards are higher, and publicity is significant."
In the United States, the majority of product liability laws are determined at the state level and vary widely from state to state. Each type of product liability claim requires proof of different elements in order to present a valid claim.
For a variety of complex historical reasons beyond the scope of this article, personal injury lawsuits in tort for monetary damages were virtually nonexistent before the Second Industrial Revolution of the 19th century. As a subset of personal injury cases, product liability cases were extraordinarily rare, but it appears that in the few that were brought, the general rule at early common law was probably what modern observers would call no-fault or strict liability. In other words, the plaintiff only needed to prove causation and damages.
Common law courts began to shift towards a no-liability regime for products (except for cases of fraud or breach of express warranty) by developing the doctrine of caveat emptor (buyer beware) in the early 1600s. As personal injury and product liability claims began to slowly increase during the early First Industrial Revolution (due to increased mobility of both people and products), common law courts in both England and the United States in the 1840s erected further barriers to plaintiffs by requiring them to prove negligence on the part of the defendant (i.e., that the defendant was at fault because its conduct had failed to meet the standard of care expected of a reasonable person), and to overcome the defense of lack of privity of contract in cases where the plaintiff had not dealt directly with the manufacturer (as exemplified by Winterbottom v. Wright (1842)). During the Second Industrial Revolution of the mid-to-late 19th century, consumers increasingly became several steps removed from the original manufacturers of products and the unjust effects of all these doctrines became widely evident.
State courts in the United States began to look for ways to ameliorate the harsh effects of such legal doctrines, as did the British Parliament. For example, one method was to find implied warranties implicit in the nature of certain contracts; by the end of the 19th century, enough U.S. states had adopted an implied warranty of merchantable quality that this warranty was restated in statutory form in the U.S. Uniform Sales Act of 1906, which drew inspiration from the British Sale of Goods Act 1893.