Product Liability in Component Manufacturing By Greg Vassmer, technical coordinator, ARPM, and Joe Keglewitsch, partner, Ice Miller LLP
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here are very few Latin phrases known broadly in America, but – at least to some generations – caveat emptor is one: Let the buyer beware. With that phrase, high school children in the 1960s and ‘70s were taught that, when buying a product, they were responsible to understand any inherent dangers the product might pose. This principle originated in the industrial revolutions of the 19th century where the courts actively worked to make it difficult for injured parties to recover damages suffered due to product defects. Even cases of clear negligence were lost by injured parties because they lacked a written contract with the manufacturers of the defective products. As products became more complex and technological and the consumer became further removed from the manufacturer, state law began to recognize that there was an “implied warranty of merchantable quality” – in plain terms, if someone sells a product to provide a function, it needs to perform that function. A patchwork of state laws and competing interpretations of implied warranty and contract law confused the issue until 1963, when the Supreme Court of California ruled that liability should not be based on the manufacturer’s warranty, but rather on whether the manufacturer was part of the business enterprise responsible for causing injury. In 1964, this strict liability was extended to all parties in the supply chain, including sales representatives, retailers, subsuppliers and, in 1969, even injured bystanders could collect. As often is the case, the California laws established the direction taken by the rest of the US. Between 1960 and 1977, 42 federal laws were passed dealing with consumer and worker safety, and most states came to the same conclusion as California and passed similar liability laws during that same time frame. Modern product liability became a legal specialty and a mountain of lawsuits resulted. The struggle since then has been on how to define “defects” and to decide what constitutes a reasonable effort by the 6 Inside Rubber // 2022 Issue 1
