Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
United States. ”
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The case involved canned tongue that had somehow gone foul,
causing the person who ate it to become quite sick. In upholding the injured person's
right to sue the canner of the unsafe product, the court ruled:
To the old rule [of privity] should be added another exception—not one arbi-
trarily worked by the court—but arising … from the changing conditions of
society. An exception to a rule will be declared by courts when the case is not an
isolated instance, but general in its character and the existing rule does not square
with justice. Under such circumstances, a court will, if free from the restraint of
some statute, declare a rule that will meet the full intendment of the law.
This new rule was said by the court to be necessary due to the “modern method of
preparing food for use by the consumer, and the more general and ever increasing use
of prepared food products.” The rule was also premised on what the court called “the
demands of social justice. ”
Plainly, the law was being forced to catch up with the rise of mass production and
broader distribution of consumer products. A new relationship between producer and
user was emerging, and the courts were being called upon to grapple with the socio-
legal implications. Where once a person might grow their own food, or buy food from
someone with whom they had a personal relationship, in a face-to-face dealing, now
packaged food came from myriad sources with nothing to identify the maker except
brand names. And so the
Mazetti
court held that anyone injured by a food product had
the right to sue its manufacturer for the breach of an implied warranty that the food
was safe, even in the absence of privity. This is the beginning of modern food product
liability because the court accepted and addressed the reality the consumer faced in
having to simply trust that the food they purchased was safe. Notably, the court also
threw to one side the concern expressed in
Winterbottom v. Wright
about making
hardship exceptions to a rule in order to provide an injured person with a legal remedy.
This time the exception was made, and a new consumer-friendly remedy was created.
The Modern Rule of Strict Liability
Although a precursor to strict liability, the remedy that the court created in the
Mazetti
decision was still one arising from contract. This changed, however, when the rule of
strict liability was fi rst announced by a court in 1963 in a case that involved a defec-
tive power tool. The case was
Greenman v. Yuba Power Products
, and it did away
with the legal fi ction that a manufacturer's liability for injury was based on the implied
promise that the product was safe to use. Writing for the California Supreme Court,
Chief Justice Roger Traynor, wrote that it was “clear that the liability is not one gov-
erned by the law of contract warranties but by the law of strict liability in tort.”
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The
stated purpose was “to insure that the costs of injuries resulting from defective prod-
ucts are borne by the manufacturer that put such products on the market rather than
by the injured persons who are powerless to protect themselves.”
Under the new rule of strict liability, to hold a manufacturer liable, a person injured
by a product need only show that: 1) the product was defective, 2) it was used as
intended, and 3) the defect caused the injury. The care used in the manufacture of the
product is irrelevant to the determination of liability. The only issue in a product
