Liability duties

A breach of duty under either common law or statute that causes injury or damage may result in those responsible having a legal liability to pay compensation (termed damages) to the aggrieved party. 

As stated in previous sections of this chapter, there exists at all times a statutory and common law duty on all employers (which includes all engineers) to maintain a safe working environment for all their employees and the public at large. Additionally, it is contractual obligation on the insured under liability insurance policies to maintain the best reasonable standards of working procedures, equipment and the environment at all times. Consequently, there is a duty on all engineers to conduct their... 

Johnson [17] identifies several topics related to liability, and she offers an important distinction as well. Among the topics related to liability and computer use in general are legal liability, the duty of honesty, the nature of contracts, misrepresentation, express and implied warranties, and negligence [17]. The relevant distinction concerns the nature of software as either a product or a service. Many of these topics hold little interest for the ethicist investigating computer ethics. For instance, legal liability is less important to philosophy than to jurisprudence. 

Recall that liability for malpractice requires proof that the defendant-physician violated not the jury s standards, but the standards of fellow practitioners when prescribing DES. The allocation of the liability risks in the DES cases between manufacturer and physician is only illustrative rather than prescriptive of the form of allocation that will occur for the products of pharmacogenomics. The main thrust of the DES cases is to illustrate that the standard of care for physicians undergoes a major shift when physicians are operating on the frontiers of medical practice or engaged in clinical research. This allows for the manufacturer s responsibility to be derivative of the physician s duty to deal "fairly" with patients with regard to the risks. 

A recently filed case in Pennsylvania illustrates a possible new face for liability (Cassidy v. SmithKline Beecham, 1999). The plaintiff claims that the manufacturer of a vaccine for Lyme disease should have warned physicians and patients in its advertisements that 30% of the population ran the risk of developing "treatment-resistant Lyme arthritis" because their particular genotype interacted adversely with the vaccine. This duty to warn is based not in product liability doctrine, but on negligence. 

Where a company suspects that the product is to be used in a way that is not safe for patients, its duty to those patients may involve warning the doctor that it considers the proposed use to be hazardous and, if necessary, refusing or terminating supply. While there is no general obligation to provide product information with unlicensed medicines (and, as noted above, the use of promotional material is prohibited), from a product liability standpoint, the provision of basic safety information about the product is a sensible precaution. 

The court noted that the existence of a law governing an activity doesn t automatically mean that there can t also be civil liability for that act. Where a defendant s conduct creates a foreseeable zone of risk, the law generally will recognize a duty placed upon defendant either to lessen the risk or see that sufficient precautions are taken to protect others from the harm that the risk poses. Further, as the risk grows greater, so does the duty, because the risk to be perceived defines the duty that must be undertaken. Because firearms are so dangerous, the duty of the seller is quite substantial. 

Although hydroxycarbamide is a licensed medication, it is not licensed for the management of sickle cell anaemia use in this case is unlicensed or off-licence. As every pharmacist assumes a duty of care to a patient when supplying a medicine, this means that if an adverse reaction is suffered, the supplying pharmacist may assume some liability along with the doctor who prescribed it. 

The first court decisions applied the same legal test to informed consent cases that was applied to negligence cases The practitioner was held to the standard of the reasonable person. Liability was imposed if the practitioner was found to have breached the duty to act as a reasonable practitioner would have acted under the same or similar circumstances. In determining the standard of care expected of the practitioner, the courts allowed other practitioners to testify concerning the warnings or disclosures that were necessary. Hence, the standard was a profession-set one, based on expert testimony and determined by the conduct of other practitioners. If the defendant practitioner provided that amount of information deemed to be reasonable by other practitioners, then a breach of duty did not occur. 

The imposing of a fine relating to the duties set out in Article 10 shall not remove any legal liabilities that may arise. 

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