Products Liability: Consumer Protection in America

1969 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 54-80
Author(s):  
P. N. Legh-Jones
Keyword(s):  
Common Law ◽  
Strict Liability ◽  
Consumer Products ◽  
State Courts ◽  
Products Liability ◽  
Liability Law ◽  
Convenient Means ◽  
American Law ◽  
The Common ◽  
Law Commission

The Law Commission is currently scrutinising the legal liability of manufacturers and sellers of consumer goods under the English law of sale, and it may possibly recommend reform of the existing law to provide greater protection for consumers. A convenient means of assessing the effect and scope of such proposals will be to compare them with the doctrines of current American “products liability law.” These doctrines have subjected sellers of consumer products in America to a strict liability towards their consumers in respect of defective products. This article is intended to be a survey and analysis of the different causes of action provided by American law. It will be necessary to distinguish the different features and origins of each doctrine since the principles of products liability law have been evolved from case to case by the American state courts in a manner which calls to mind the remark of Holmes that “it is the merit of the common law that it decides the cases first and determines the principle afterwards.”

Products Liability Law – Lessons from the Military and Industrial Contexts

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 303-322
Author(s):  
Nathan A. Schachtman
Keyword(s):  
Common Law ◽  
Consumer Products ◽  
State Court ◽  
Court Cases ◽  
Industrial Products ◽  
Products Liability ◽  
Product Use ◽  
Liability Law ◽  
Industrial Settings ◽  
The Military

AbstractThe policy bases for American products liability law have developed largely through a series of state court cases that involved products sold to ordinary consumers. These cases featured significant disparities between manufacturers and injured consumers in understanding latent risks from product use, and in their ability to avoid the risks and to absorb and to distribute the costs of the risks. The policy bases that appear cogent for consumer products fail to explain or justify the imposition of liability in many industrial settings, which involve military or industrial customers that are well aware of the products’ latent risks and that have moral, common law, statutory, and regulatory duties to ensure that the industrial products are used safely.

Strict liability in Commonwealth criminal law

Legal Studies ◽  
1983 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-145
Author(s):  
G. L. Peiris
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Law ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Strict Liability ◽  
Mens Rea ◽  
English Court ◽  
American Law ◽  
Criminal Jurisprudence ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Common ◽  
Moral Blame

It has been observed justly that few legal doctrines have given rise to so vigorous and sustained a conflict of judicial attitudes as the concept of strict penal responsibility. The theory of mens rea which preceded the origins of the common law, is ingrained in English criminal jurisprudence. An English court has asserted that ‘It is contrary to the whole established law of England (unless the legislation on the subject has clearly enacted it) to say that a person can be guilty of a crime in England without a wrongful intent’. In circumstances involving technical guilt bereft of moral blame English judges have looked askance at invocation of the criminal process. The American Law Institute has recently declared that ‘No principle is more broadly accepted than that the criminal law, involving as it does both punishment and condemnation, should be concerned with conduct that is morally reprehensible or culpable’.

Rediscovering Blackstone: wpływ Williama Blackstone’a na rozwój amerykańskiej nauki prawa w recepcji Alberta W. Alschulera

2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-185
Author(s):  
Edyta Sokalska
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Common Law ◽  
The United States ◽  
Law School ◽  
Large Measure ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
Late 18Th Century ◽  
American Law ◽  
The Common

The reception of common law in the United States was stimulated by a very popular and influential treatise Commentaries on the Laws of England by Sir William Blackstone, published in the late 18th century. The work of Blackstone strengthened the continued reception of the common law from the American colonies into the constituent states. Because of the large measure of sovereignty of the states, common law had not exactly developed in the same way in every state. Despite the fact that a single common law was originally exported from England to America, a great variety of factors had led to the development of different common law rules in different states. Albert W. Alschuler from University of Chicago Law School is one of the contemporary American professors of law. The part of his works can be assumed as academic historical-legal narrations, especially those concerning Blackstone: Rediscovering Blackstone and Sir William Blackstone and the Shaping of American Law. Alschuler argues that Blackstone’s Commentaries inspired the evolution of American and British law. He introduces not only the profile of William Blackstone, but also examines to which extent the concepts of Blackstone have become the basis for the development of the American legal thought.

scholarly journals Where There’s At-Will, There Are Many Ways: Redressing the Increasing Incoherence of Employment at Will

2005 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott A. Moss
Keyword(s):  
Free Market ◽  
Common Law ◽  
State Courts ◽  
Free Enterprise ◽  
Employment At Will ◽  
Legal Remedy ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Common ◽  
At Will

Employment at will, the doctrine holding that employees have no legal remedy for unfair terminations because they hold their jobs at the will of the employer, has become mired in incoherence. State courts praise the common law rule as “essential to free enterprise” and “central to the free market,” but in recent years they increasingly have riddled the rule with exceptions, allowing employee claims for whistleblowing, fraud, etc. Yet states have neither rejected employment at will nor shown any consistency in recognizing exceptions. Strikingly, states cite the same rationales to adopt and reject opposite exceptions, as a case study of two states illustrates: One state accepts exception X to protect employees while rejecting exception Y to maintain employment at will; yet on the same rationales, the other accepts exception Y while rejecting X.

The Republic of Bees

2019 ◽  
pp. 77-126
Author(s):  
Lawrence M. Friedman
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Common Law ◽  
The United States ◽  
State Constitutions ◽  
System A ◽  
The Social ◽  
American Law ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Law Of Evidence

This chapter details changes in American law from the eighteenth century onward, covering federal and state constitutions, judges, organization of courts, and civil procedure, and the law of evidence. The colonies declared themselves independent in 1776. However, American law continued to borrow from English law. English doctrines that were needed and appropriate were welcome. Between 1776, and the middle of the nineteenth century, there developed a true republic of bees; their flowers were the social and economic institutions that grew up in the United States. American conditions and ideas were the lawmakers that made American law a distinctive system: a separate language within the common-law family.

Fundamental Conceptions of International Law in the Jurisprudence of the Permanent Court of International Justice

1936 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 414-438 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Arthur Steiner
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
Current Practice ◽  
Common Law ◽  
International Justice ◽  
Large Measure ◽  
American Law ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Law ◽  
Anglo American

Even in the most highly formalized systems of jurisprudence the rules and practices of the law cannot be entirely separated from the fundamental conceptions of law underlying them. The legal systems of France, The Netherlands and Germany have not been formalized to so great an extent that there is neither occasion nor opportunity for the application of the law to be conditioned by concepts derived from juridical theory. Duguit and Geny, Krabbe, and Kohler and Stammler, in their various works, have made this quite clear. In Anglo-American law the fictions so abundantly found are often no more than concrete formulations of abstract fundamental concepts which judges have thought to be valid and consistent with policy and which they could not conveniently introduce into the law in any other way. That fundamental conceptions of the law may affect its development more than their logical consistency warrants has been amply illustrated in the common law, equity, and American constitutional law. What is true of well-developed systems of jurisprudence is no less true of international law. Fundamental conceptions have probably had a greater influence here, since theologic and scholastic philosophies explain many of the rules of modern practice, and the rules of current practice owe their very existence, in large measure, to the reconciliaation of the philosophical concepts of the State, sovereignty and independence with the conception of a community of nations and a rule of law.

Time for an English Commercial Code?

1997 ◽  
Vol 56 (3) ◽  
pp. 516-536
Author(s):  
Dame Mary Arden
Keyword(s):  
Common Law ◽  
Law Reform ◽  
England And Wales ◽  
Commercial Code ◽  
Unique Experience ◽  
The Common ◽  
Systematic Development ◽  
The Law ◽  
Lord Chancellor ◽  
Law Commission

Parliament has imposed on the Law Commission the duty to review the law of England and Wales “with a view to its systematic development and reform, including in particular the codification of [the] law … and generally the simplification and modernisation of the law”. There are a number of points which flow from this. First, as a body which reviews great swathes of the common law to see if they require to be modernised or simplified, the Law Commission has a unique standpoint from which to view the strengths and weaknesses of the common law method. Second, it has unique experience of law reform and the Parliamentary process. Third, in discharge of its functions, it has an interest in seeing that, if codification is appropriate, a recommendation to that effect is made to the Lord Chancellor. It need not be the Law Commission which carries out the recommendation, and indeed the Law Commission could not carry out a project purely of its own initiative.

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