Escola v. Coca-Cola Bottling Co.

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Escola v. Coca-Cola Bottling Co.
Seal of the Supreme Court of California.svg
Decided July 5, 1944
Full case nameGladys Escola, Respondent, v. Coca Cola Bottling Company of Fresno (a Corporation), Appellant.
Citation(s) 24 Cal.2d 453, 150 P.2d 436
Case history
Prior historyAppeal from a judgment upon a jury verdict in favor of plaintiff
Subsequent historynone
Holding
Judgment for plaintiff affirmed under res ipsa loquitur .
Court membership
Chief Justice Phil S. Gibson
Associate Justices John W. Shenk, Douglas L. Edmonds, Jesse W. Carter, Roger J. Traynor, B. Rey Schauer, Jesse W. Curtis
Case opinions
MajorityGibson, joined by Shenk, Curtis, Carter, Schauer
ConcurrenceTraynor
Edmonds took no part in the consideration or decision of the case.

Escola v. Coca-Cola Bottling Co., 24 Cal.2d 453, 150 P.2d 436 (1944), was a decision of the Supreme Court of California involving an injury caused by an exploding bottle of Coca-Cola. It was an important case in the development of the common law of product liability in the United States, not so much for the actual majority opinion, but for the concurring opinion of California Supreme Court justice Roger Traynor. [1] [2]

Contents

Background

Plaintiff Gladys Escola was a waitress in a restaurant. She was putting away glass bottles of Coca-Cola when one of the bottles spontaneously exploded in her hand. She suffered a deep five-inch cut, which severed the blood vessels, nerves, and muscles of the thumb and palm of the hand.

The top portion of the bottle, with the cap, remained in her hand, and the lower portion fell to the floor but did not break. The broken bottle was not produced at the trial, as the pieces had been thrown away by an employee of the restaurant shortly after the accident. Escola, however, described the broken pieces, and a diagram of the bottle was made showing the location of the "fracture line," where the bottle broke in two. One of Coca-Cola's delivery drivers was called as a witness by plaintiff, and he testified that he had seen other bottles of Coca-Cola in the past explode and had found broken bottles in the warehouse when he took the cases out but that he did not know what made them blow up.

Escola was represented at trial by legendary litigator Melvin Belli, then in the early stage of his career. He later acknowledged in his own autobiography that he did not then fully comprehend that her case would become a far-reaching landmark case. [3] The jury returned a verdict for the plaintiff, following the doctrine of res ipsa loquitur .

Majority opinion

Chief Justice Phil S. Gibson affirmed the judgment of the lower court. He held that even though the instrument causing the injury was not under the exclusive control of the defendant at the time of the accident, the defendant had control at the time the alleged negligent act took place (the filling of the defective bottle).

Upon an examination of the record, the evidence appears sufficient to support a reasonable inference that the bottle here involved was not damaged by any extraneous force after delivery to the restaurant by defendant. It follows, therefore, that the bottle was in some manner defective at the time defendant relinquished control, because sound and properly prepared bottles of carbonated liquids do not ordinarily explode when carefully handled. [Escola, 24 Cal.2d at 459]

Furthermore, even though the defendant produced evidence to rebut the inference of negligence that arises upon application of the doctrine of res ipsa loquitur by discussing its safety testing procedures, Gibson ruled that the question was properly submitted to the jury and did not modify the jury's verdict.

Concurring opinion

Justice Roger Traynor concurred in the judgment but argued that instead of deciding the case on grounds of negligence, a rule of strict liability should be imposed on manufacturers whose products cause injury to consumers. Basing his reasoning heavily on earlier cases (especially MacPherson v. Buick Motor Co. ), Traynor argued that public policy demanded "that responsibility be fixed wherever it will most effectively reduce the hazards to life and health inherent in defective products that reach the market." He felt that manufacturers were better prepared to handle the costs of injury than individual consumers, and he noted that California state law already applied a rule of strict liability to makers of foodstuffs that cause illness or injury.

Traynor also felt that the majority's reasoning approached a rule of strict liability even though the decision was ostensibly based on the doctrine of res ipsa loquitur:

In leaving it to the jury to decide whether the inference has been dispelled, regardless of the evidence against it, the negligence rule approaches the rule of strict liability. It is needlessly circuitous to make negligence the basis of recovery and impose what is in reality liability without negligence. If public policy demands that a manufacturer of goods be responsible for their quality regardless of negligence there is no reason not to fix that responsibility openly. 24 Cal.2d at 463.

Traynor also wrote that the nature of the modern system of the mass production and distribution of goods made it difficult or impossible for consumers to inspect and verify that the products they were purchasing were safe or to demonstrate that the manufacturer had been negligent. That made strict liability a more practical standard.

Legacy

Today, Escola is widely recognized as a landmark case in American law [1] [2] [4] [5] [6] and is mandatory reading for first-year students in most American law schools. [7] [8] The reason is that in 1963, Traynor wrote a majority opinion, Greenman v. Yuba Power Products , 59 Cal. 2d 57 (1963), in which the Court at last adopted the rule he had suggested 19 years earlier. In Greenman, Traynor wrote: "We need not recanvass the reasons for imposing strict liability on the manufacturer. They have been fully articulated in the cases cited." Of course, among those cases was his own concurrence in Escola. Because Traynor incorporated by reference his own discussion in Escola, the two cases are usually assigned and discussed together.

Related Research Articles

Negligence is a failure to exercise appropriate and/or ethical ruled care expected to be exercised amongst specified circumstances. The area of tort law known as negligence involves harm caused by failing to act as a form of carelessness possibly with extenuating circumstances. The core concept of negligence is that people should exercise reasonable care in their actions, by taking account of the potential harm that they might foreseeably cause to other people or property.

Product liability is the area of law in which manufacturers, distributors, suppliers, retailers, and others who make products available to the public are held responsible for the injuries those products cause. Although the word "product" has broad connotations, product liability as an area of law is traditionally limited to products in the form of tangible personal property.

In law and insurance, a proximate cause is an event sufficiently related to an injury that the courts deem the event to be the cause of that injury. There are two types of causation in the law: cause-in-fact, and proximate cause. Cause-in-fact is determined by the "but for" test: But for the action, the result would not have happened. The action is a necessary condition, but may not be a sufficient condition, for the resulting injury. A few circumstances exist where the but for test is ineffective. Since but-for causation is very easy to show, a second test is used to determine if an action is close enough to a harm in a "chain of events" to be legally valid. This test is called proximate cause. Proximate cause is a key principle of Insurance and is concerned with how the loss or damage actually occurred. There are several competing theories of proximate cause. For an act to be deemed to cause a harm, both tests must be met; proximate cause is a legal limitation on cause-in-fact.

Res ipsa loquitur is a doctrine in the Anglo-American common law and Roman Dutch law that says in a tort or civil lawsuit a court can infer negligence from the very nature of an accident or injury in the absence of direct evidence on how any defendant behaved. Although modern formulations differ by jurisdiction, Anglo-American common law originally stated that the accident must satisfy the necessary elements of negligence: duty, breach of duty, causation, and injury. In res ipsa loquitur, the elements of duty of care, breach, and causation are inferred from an injury that does not ordinarily occur without negligence.

A tort, in common law jurisdiction, is a civil wrong that causes a claimant to suffer loss or harm, resulting in legal liability for the person who commits the tortious act. It can include intentional infliction of emotional distress, negligence, financial losses, injuries, invasion of privacy, and many other things. The word 'tort' stems from Old French via the Norman Conquest and Latin via the Roman Empire.

In criminal and civil law, strict liability is a standard of liability under which a person is legally responsible for the consequences flowing from an activity even in the absence of fault or criminal intent on the part of the defendant.

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Byrne v Boadle is an English tort law case that first applied the doctrine of res ipsa loquitur.

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Roger J. Traynor American judge

Roger John Traynor was the 23rd Chief Justice of California (1964-1970) and an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of California from 1940 to 1964. Previously, he also had served as a Deputy Attorney General of California under Earl Warren, and an Acting Dean and Professor of UC Berkeley School of Law. He is widely considered to be one of the most creative and influential judges as well as legal scholars of his time.

Comparative negligence, called non-absolute contributory negligence outside the United States, is a partial legal defense that reduces the amount of damages that a plaintiff can recover in a negligence-based claim, based upon the degree to which the plaintiff's own negligence contributed to cause the injury. When the defense is asserted, the factfinder, usually a jury, must decide the degree to which the plaintiff's negligence and the combined negligence of all other relevant actors all contributed to cause the plaintiff's damages. It is a modification of the doctrine of contributory negligence that disallows any recovery by a plaintiff whose negligence contributed even minimally to causing the damages.

Comparative responsibility is a doctrine of tort law that compares the fault of each party in a lawsuit for a single injury. Comparative responsibility may apply to intentional torts as well as negligence and encompasses the doctrine of comparative negligence.

Melvin Belli American lawyer

Melvin Mouron Belli was a prominent United States lawyer, author, and actor known as "The King of Torts" and by insurance companies as "Melvin Bellicose". He had many celebrity clients, including Zsa Zsa Gabor, Errol Flynn, Chuck Berry, Muhammad Ali, The Rolling Stones, Jim Bakker and Tammy Faye Bakker, Martha Mitchell, Maureen Connolly, Lana Turner, Tony Curtis, and Mae West. During his legal career, he won over $600 million in damages for his clients. He was also the attorney for Jack Ruby, who shot Lee Harvey Oswald for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Tort reform Type of judicial reform

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<i>Henningsen v. Bloomfield Motors, Inc.</i>

In Henningsen v. Bloomfield Motors, Inc., 32 N.J. 358, 161 A.2d 69, the New Jersey Supreme Court held that an automobile manufacturer's attempt to use an express warranty that disclaimed an implied warranty of merchantability was invalid.

The following outline is provided as an overview of and introduction to tort law:

<i>Chysky v. Drake Bros. Co.</i>

Chysky v. Drake Bros. Co., 235 N.Y. 468, 139 N.E. 576 (1922), was a products liability case before the New York Court of Appeals. The Court held that a plaintiff cannot recover from a defendant based on implied warranty when she does not have contractual privity with him; thus, a plaintiff cannot recover from a defendant who sold her employer food unfit for consumption, because the defendant's implied warranty extended only to the employer.

Ybarra v. Spangard was a leading case in California discussing the exclusive control element of res ipsa loquitur. "Where a plaintiff receives unusual injuries while unconscious and in the course of medical treatment, all those defendants who had any control over his body or the instrumentalities which might have caused the injuries may properly be called upon to meet the inference of negligence by giving an explanation of their conduct."

<i>Greenman v. Yuba Power Products, Inc.</i>

Greenman v. Yuba Power Products, Inc, was a California torts case in which the Supreme Court of California dealt with the torts regarding product liability and warranty breaches. The primary legal issue of the case was to determine whether a manufacturer is strictly liable in tort when an article he places on the market proves to have a defect that causes injury to a human being. The case was originally heard in a San Diego district court where the verdict was against the manufacturer. This verdict was appealed by the manufacturer to the Supreme Court of California which was presided by Gibson, C. J., Schauer, J., McComb, J., Peters, J., Tobriner, J., and Peek, J., and the opinion was delivered by Judge Roger J Traynor.

References

  1. 1 2 Vandall, Frank J. (2011). A History of Civil Litigation: Political and Economic Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 27. ISBN   9780199781096.
  2. 1 2 Goldberg, John C.P.; Sebok, Anthony J.; Zipursky, Benjamin C.; Kendrick, Leslie C. (2021). Tort Law: Responsibilities and Redress (5th ed.). New York: Wolters Kluwer. p. 981. ISBN   9781543821086 . Retrieved 11 December 2021.
  3. ↑ Belli, Melvin; Kaiser, Robert Blair (1976). Melvin Belli: My Life on Trial, an Autobiography. New York: William Morrow and Company. p. 208.
  4. ↑ Feinman, Jay M. (2014). Law 101 (4th ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 166. ISBN   9780199341696.
  5. ↑ O'Connell, Jeffrey; Linehan, John (2006). Carrington, Paul D.; Jones, Trina (eds.). "The Rise and Fall (and Rise Again?) of Accident Law: A Continuing Saga". Law and Class in America: Trends Since the Cold War. New York: New York University Press: 349–363. ISBN   9780814716540 . Retrieved 12 February 2017.
  6. ↑ Friedman, Lawrence M. (2004). American Law in the 20th Century. New Haven: Yale University Press. pp. 356–357. ISBN   9780300102994.
  7. ↑ Takacs, David (2011). "Torts Outline | Fall 2011". Google Docs. Archived from the original on 2018-10-04. Retrieved 4 October 2018.
  8. ↑ Zittrain, Jonathan (4 Oct 2018). "Torts Syllabus | Spring 2018" (PDF). Harvard Blogs. Archived from the original (pdf) on 2018-10-04. Retrieved 4 October 2018.
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