Nearly all American legal experts agree that liability law in the US is totally broken. What they
don't agree on is
which aspects are broken and how to fix them.
On the one hand, you really don't want the rich and powerful to be effectively immune to consequences from negligence and other misbehavior. On the other hand, you also don't want ordinary reasonable engineering to lead to massive legal liability.
If you want a fascinating read, do a search for the lawn mower case (although there were many such). On the one hand, power lawn mowers could be made safer through the addition of very simple safety features with little-to-no impact on cost. Examples include tilt switches, dead-man switches, etc. Indeed, these features were added to mowers in the 1970s.
On the other hand, in one case my wife studied back when we were in college, the plaintiff:
- deliberately disabled the tilt switch (because his lawn was too steeply sloped, so the tilt switch kept shutting down the lawn mower).
- deliberately disabled the dead-man switch because it was too difficult to hold it closed while mowing the steep hillside
- then, when the mower clogged, he turned it upside down and reached in to remove the clog -- without bothering to turn off the mower.
For some strange reason, the mower destroyed his hand.
He won a million-dollar judgement against the mower's manufacturer because he "should not have been able to disable the safety features."
If I had been on that jury, I'd have been asking the judge if it was possible to vote "too stupid to live!"
Or, for another example, until recently aircraft manufacturers were considered to be liable for design defects in their planes -- even when the "defect" in question was far beyond the state of the art at the time when the aircraft was designed and built. That's right -- they could be considered liable for a design defect in, say, a DC-3 (designed in the early 1930s)! Even though no one in the world understood fluid dynamics well enough to avoid the defect in question until the 1980s (a real example --
). This one changed when congress passed a "statute of repose" limiting such liability to 40 years, IIRC. (I may have that number wrong. Any expert care to correct me?)
Before the change more than 50% of the cost of a light aircraft went to purchase liability insurance for the manufacturer. After the change, this dropped to about 5%. I wonder why...
Please note that in all the above examples, I have not distinguished liability for consequential damages from punitive damages. I'm simply after the question of whether the manufacturer (or the PE who signed off on the design, for that matter) should be liable
at all.
Lest you think this problem is easy, however, remember that many a company has refused to take any action whatsoever to improve product safety until prodded by a combination of regulation and liability lawsuits. It seems clear to me that US product liability law currently errs in the direction of too much liability for the folks with the deep pockets, and not enough responsibility for the individual consumer. I'm not at all clear, however, on what specific fix one could make that would provide overall benefit rather than making things still worse.
Suggestions, anyone?
Xenophon