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.
Caveat emptor is Latin for "Let the buyer beware". It has become a proverb in English. Generally, caveat emptor is the contract law principle that controls the sale of real property after the date of closing, but may also apply to sales of other goods. The phrase caveat emptor and its use as a disclaimer of warranties arises from the fact that buyers typically have less information than the seller about the good or service they are purchasing. This quality of the situation is known as 'information asymmetry'. Defects in the good or service may be hidden from the buyer, and only known to the seller.
The doctrine of privity of contract is a common law principle which provides that a contract cannot confer rights or impose obligations upon anyone who is not a party to that contract. It is related to, but distinct from, the doctrine of consideration, according to which a promise is legally enforceable only if valid consideration has been provided for it, and a plaintiff is legally entitled to enforce such a promise only if he is a promisee from whom the consideration has moved.
An extended warranty, sometimes called a service agreement, a service contract, or a maintenance agreement, is a prolonged warranty offered to consumers in addition to the standard warranty on new items. The extended warranty may be offered by the warranty administrator, the retailer or the manufacturer. Extended warranties cost extra and for a percentage of the item's retail price. Occasionally, some extended warranties that are purchased for multiple years state in writing that during the first year, the consumer must still deal with the manufacturer in the occurrence of malfunction. Thus, what is often promoted as a five-year extended guarantee, for example, is actually only a four-year guarantee.
In contract law, a warranty is a contractual assurance given by a seller to a buyer, for example confirming that the seller is the owner of the property being sold. A warranty is a term of a contract, but not usually a condition of the contract or an innominate term, meaning that it is a term "not going to the root of the contract", and therefore only entitles the innocent party to damages if it is breached, i.e. if the warranty is not true or the defaulting party does not perform the contract in accordance with the terms of the warranty. A warranty is not a guarantee: it is a mere promise. It may be enforced if it is breached by an award for the legal remedy of damages.
In common law jurisdictions, an implied warranty is a contract law term for certain assurances that are presumed to be made in the sale of products or real property, due to the circumstances of the sale. These assurances are characterized as warranties regardless of whether the seller has expressly promised them orally or in writing. They include an implied warranty of fitness for a particular purpose, an implied warranty of merchantability for products, implied warranty of workmanlike quality for services, and an implied warranty of habitability for a home.
In American English, a lemon is a vehicle that turns out to have several manufacturing issues affecting its safety, value or utility. Any vehicle with such severe issues may be termed a lemon, and by extension, so may any product with flaws too great or severe to serve its purpose.
Lemon laws are laws that provide a remedy for purchasers of cars and other consumer goods in order to compensate for products that repeatedly fail to meet standards of quality and performance. Although many types of products can be defective, the term "lemon" is mostly used to describe defective motor vehicles, such as cars, trucks, and motorcycles.
As is, when employed as a term with legal effect, is used to disclaim some implied warranties for an item being sold. Certain types of implied warranties must be specifically disclaimed, such as the implied warranty of title. "As is" denotes that the seller is selling, and the buyer is buying an item in whatever condition it presently exists, and that the buyer is accepting the item "with all faults", whether or not immediately apparent. A similar concept is a "buyer beware" claim, where the careful buyer should take the time to examine the item before accepting it, or obtain expert advice.
The Magnuson–Moss Warranty Act is a United States federal law. Enacted in 1975, the federal statute governs warranties on consumer products. The law does not require any product to have a warranty, but if it does have a warranty, the warranty must comply with this law. The law was created to fix problems as a result of manufacturers using disclaimers on warranties in an unfair or misleading manner.
MacPherson v. Buick Motor Co., 217 N.Y. 382, 111 N.E. 1050 (1916) is a famous New York Court of Appeals opinion by Judge Benjamin N. Cardozo that removed the requirement of privity of contract for duty in negligence actions.
Redhibition is a civil action available under Louisiana law against the seller and/or manufacturer of a defective product, similar to the lemon laws more familiar to common law jurisdictions in other U.S. states. Redhibition is one of many laws that are unique to Louisiana among U.S. states because of its tradition in French and Spanish civil law.
When a person makes a claim for personal injury damages that have resulted from the presence of a defective automobile or component of an automobile, that person asserts a product liability claim. That claim may be against the automobile's manufacturer, the manufacturer of a component part or system, or both, as well as potentially being raised against companies that distributed, sold or installed the part or system that is alleged to be defective.
Friend v. Childs Dining Hall Co., 231 Mass. 65, 120 N.E. 407 (1918), is part of a progression of cases that influenced the products liability synthesis that emerged in the 1930s. These cases influenced Judge Cardozo's argument in MacPherson v. Buick Motor Co. that a person could be liable for a defective product to someone other than the immediate purchaser. This created the law of product liability.
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.
Loop v. Litchfield 42 N. Y. 351 (1870) was a part of the historic line of cases holding that the privity requirement barred a products liability action unless the product in question was "inherently dangerous."
Devlin v. Smith, 89 N.Y. 470 (1882) was a seminal case decided by the New York Court of Appeals in the area of product liability law.
John J. Francis was an American Democratic Party politician and jurist who served as an associate justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court from 1957 until his retirement in 1972.
Increases in the use of autonomous car technologies are causing incremental shifts in the responsibility of driving, with the primary motivation of reducing the frequency of traffic collisions. Liability for incidents involving self-driving cars is a developing area of law and policy that will determine who is liable when a car causes physical damage to persons or property. As autonomous cars shift the responsibility of driving from humans to autonomous car technology, there is a need for existing liability laws to evolve in order to reasonably identify the appropriate remedies for damage and injury. As higher levels of autonomy are commercially introduced, the insurance industry stands to see higher proportions of commercial and product liability lines, while personal automobile insurance shrinks.
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.
