Products Liability

Harmful drugs, Defective Products, Vehicles Prone to Rollover & Roof Crush, Seat Belts That Fail, Car Doors That Swing Open & Eject The Occupants, Faulty Pacemakers, Tires That Blow, Bead Separation Cases, Airbags That Fail To Deploy, Design Defects, Manufactures Defects, and Malfunctioning Devices, these deadly products should be eradicated from our market system so that innocent citizens no longer get injured or even killed by these unsafe hazards.

In Arizona, claims most commonly associated with product liability are negligence, strict liability, breach of warranty, and various consumer protection claims. There are three major types of product liability claims: manufacturing defect, design defect, and a failure to warn.

Defects: Manufacturing defects are those that occur in the manufacturing process and usually involve poor-quality materials or shoddy worksmanship. Design defects occur where the product design is inherently dangerous or useless (and hence defective) no matter how carefully manufactured. Failure-to-warn defects arise in products that carry inherent non-obvious dangers which could be mitigated through adequate warnings to the user, and these dangers are present regardless of how well the product is manufactured and designed for its intended purpose.

Warranties are statements by a manufacturer or seller concerning a product during a commercial transaction. Breach of warranty-based product liability claims usually focus on one of three types: (1) breach of an express warranty, (2) breach of an implied warranty of merchantability, and (3) breach of an implied warranty of fitness for a particular purpose.

Negligence: A basic negligence claim consists of: a duty owed, a breach of that duty, an injury, and that the breach proximately caused the plaintiff's injury.

Strict Liability: Rather than focus on the behavior of the manufacturer (as in negligence), strict liability claims focus on the product itself. Under strict liability, the manufacturer is liable if the product is defective, even if the manufacturer was not negligent in making that product defective. The difficulty with negligence is that it still requires the plaintiff to prove that the defendant's conduct fell below the relevant standard of care. However, if an entire industry tacitly settles on a somewhat careless standard of conduct, then the plaintiff may not be able to recover even though he or she is severely injured, because although the defendant's conduct caused his or her injuries, such conduct was not negligent in the legal sense. As a practical matter, with the increasing complexity of products, injuries, and medical care (which made many formerly fatal injuries survivable), it is quite a difficult and expensive task to find and retain good expert witnesses who can establish the standard of care, breach, and causation.

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