Theories of Liability

In the United States, the claims most commonly associated with product liability are negligence, strict liability, breach of warranty, and various consumer protection claims. Each type of product liability claim requires different elements to be proven to present a successful claim.

Types of Liability

There are three major types of product liability claims:

• manufacturing defect
• design defect
• a failure to warn (also known as marketing defects)

Negligence

A basic negligence claim consists of proof of

• a duty owed
• a breach of that duty
• the breach was the cause in fact of the plaintiff’s injury (actual cause)
• the breach proximately caused the plaintiff’s injury
• and the plaintiff suffered actual quantifiable injury (damages)

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.

Premises Liability

Premises are land and buildings together considered as a property. This usage arose from property owners finding the word in their title deeds, where it originally correctly meant “the aforementioned; what this document is about”, from Latin prae-missus = “placed before”. In this sense, the word is always used in the plural, but singular in construction. Note that a single house or a single other piece of property is “premises”, not a “premise”, although the word “premises” is plural in form as in “The equipment is located on the customer’s premises” and never “The equipment is located on the customer’s premise”.

Premises liability is the liability for a landowner for certain accidents that occur on their land. In summary Premises liability law is the body of law which makes the person who is in possession of land or premises responsible for certain injuries suffered by persons who are present on the premises. For premises liability to apply:
1. The defendant must possess the land or “premises”
2. There must be negligence or some other wrongful act.
In recent years, the law of premises liability has evolved to include cases where a person is injured on the premises of another by a third person’s wrongful act, such as an assault. These cases are sometimes referred to as “third party premises liability” cases and they represent a highly complex and dynamic area of tort law. They pose especially complex legal issues of duty and causation because the injured party is seeking to hold a possessor or owner of the property directly or vicariously liable when the immediate injury-producing act was, arguably, not caused by the possessor or owner.