Product Liability Case Study

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INTRODUCTION Product Liability refers to the legal responsibility which a manufacturer, distributer, supplier, retailer and any other business has which supplies or makes products available to the people in case there are injuries caused to the people because of those products. While dealing with Product Liability, it would be beneficial to look at what ‘Product’ and ‘Liability’ mean legally and what types of defects that are covered under Product Liability. The word ‘product’ can have a broad connotation but the products covered under the ambit of product liability are tangible personal property. While referring to liability, the claims which are most commonly associated with product liability are negligence, warranty breach, misrepresentation,…show more content…
Product liability arises when a product is sold in the market. During the earlier times, a contractual relationship between the injured person and the business/ supplier who supplied the product, known as ‘privity of contract’, had to exist for the injured person to recover. Currently in most of the states, the requirement of ‘privity of contract’ is no longer present and the injured person need not be the purchaser of the product to recover. Any person who could have been injured by a defective product can recover for his or her injuries, even if the product was sold to someone. All the parties involved in the manufacturing chain including product manufacturer, component part manufacturer, the organisation which carriers out the assembling of the components, the distributer, the wholesaler and the retailer can be held liable for the damage caused by the product. For strict liability to apply, the sale of the product must be made in the regular course of the supplier’s business i.e. through his retail shop in a legitimate manner. Thus, any party who sells a product at a garage sale would probably not be liable in a product liability…show more content…
One of the most commonly used defence is that the person bringing the case against them has not properly identified the supplier of the product that caused the injury. The person bringing the case should successfully be able to associate the product which caused the injury to the person to the supplier/business which supplied/manufactured the product. Another defence which the manufacturer or supplier might raise is that the person bringing the case to the court of law has substantially altered the product after it left his control and this alteration caused the person’s injury. Another related defence to this is that the person misused the product in an unpredictable way that caused him or her the

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