Product liability law

George Eads and Peter Reuter, Designating Safer Products Gorporate Responses to Product Liability Law and Regulation, The Rand Corporation Institute for Civil justice, Santa Monica, CA, 1983. 

This is a case where the court chose not to legislate beyond traditional product liability law. There has been a great increase in gun liability litigation in recent years, and it is far from clear whether most courts will even-mally follow the approach in Kelley or the one here. 

Products Liability Law and the Accident Rate. In Liability Perspectives... 

While efficiency dictates that different prices are charged in different markets, observable price differentials are not always due to reasons of economic efficiency or profit-maximization. Pharmaceutical prices are widely subject to nation-specific government regulation and a host of other factors. Bale (1998) provides a comprehensive review of potential reasons for price differences across countries. These include differences in such factors as IPR regimes, product liability laws, inflation rates, exchange rates, governmental price controls, per capita income, and regulatory systems. 

Product liability law, generally and as it pertains to pharmaceutical companies, is broadly based on legal principles involving contract law, the law of torts and the relevant statutory provisions of the country or jurisdiction where the action is brought (Jones, 1993). However, there are three fundamental legal principles under which a seller of a product can be liable for damages incurred from the use of that product strict liability, warranty and negligence. 

Garbutt BJ, Hofmann ME. 2003. Recent developments in pharmaceutical products liability law failure to warn, the learned intermediary defense, and other issues in the new millennium . Food Drug Law J. 58(2) 269-286. 

These tendencies can only be transformed into practical results if existing and future laws, regulations, and framework conditions are taken into account. The European legislative process, and the expansion of the European Union, will play important roles, in particular the chemical policies product liability laws. The particular relevance of these aspects to the adhesives industry and development of new adhesives, and the chances and risks involved, are treated in greater detail later. 

Even assuming that businesses in the small and medium-sized sector do manage to pay the costs of certification of harmlessness and the hazard potential descriptions, the result will be large numbers of duplicate tests, since every supplier bears responsibility for the raw materials, intermediate products and end products he uses or produces and must answer to the product liability laws. 

The liability insurance industry is a poor source of information on the drug industry s product liability experiences because companies now largely self-insure for all but the highest liability losses. The best source of information on the costs and implications of product liability law in this industry are drug companies themselves. The Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) found no published data summarizing industry experience.1... 

Although the Federal Government has not adopted product liability reforms for therapeutic pharmaceuticals, several States have, and the Federal Government has adopted no-fault compensation schemes for swine flu and childhood vaccines that could offer potential models for Federal underwriting of other product liability risks. The U S. Congress has also considered several proposals to adopt a Federal product liability law that would supersede current State law. 

Review of the effect of external factors on costs and returns on pharmaceutical R D, including new drug regulation, tax policy, product liability law, direct R D subsidies by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other government research bodies, and reimbursement policies (both private and public) for prescription drugs. 

Schwartz, T. M., Products Liability Law and Pharmaceuticals Developments and Divergent Trends, Food Drug and Cosmetic Law Jour-nal 43 33,1988. 

The product liability laws are such that if the company cannot prove that the goods that were bought/prescribed/taken by a patient are not its own, then the company is liable. How much easier to prove that the goods were not the company s if there are security features which are not to be encountered on an illegal pack. 

Of interest over the next months, perhaps years, will be the proposed Product Liability Act prepared by the Senate Commerce Committee. The central thrust of the bill is to create a federal product liability law which would preempt state liability statutes but retain the jurisdiction of the state courts. 

CPSC regulations stress that the term defect should be construed extremely broadly under the CPSA and extends at least as far as the concept of defect in products liability law. See 16 C.F.R. 1115.4. Significantly, Commission regulations state that a defect can occur in a product s packaging, warnings, and/or instructions. According to the Commission, a consumer product may contain a defect if the instructions for assembly or use could allow the product, otherwise safely designed and manufactured, to present a risk of iiyury. ... 

New European Strict Product Liability Law Affecting Biotech Products... 

In general terms, product liability refers to the liability of a seller of a product which, because of a defect, causes damage to its purchaser, user, or sometimes a bystander. The origins of product liability law can be traced to cases brought before British courts shortly after the onset of the Industrial Revolution in the first half of the nineteenth century. Since then, an ever-increasing volume of product liability cases have been brought before the courts in industrialized countries. In the USA alone, product liability lawsuits have increased from over 2000 cases in 1975, which marked the first crisis in the product liability insurance market, to over 13 000 cases in the late 1980s (Epstein,... 

Product liability law is broadly based upon legal principles involving contract law, the Law of Torts, and the relevant statutory provisions of the country or jurisdiction where the action is brought (Jones,... 

In overview, courts in various countries have interpreted pharmaceutical product liability law in various ways. The inconsistent court interpretations may be partially responsible for the increased... 

---