Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
involving harms caused by a process or a product are those known as
Negligence, Strict Liability, and Nuisance.
48
In the few lawsuits brought
in recent years for harms allegedly caused by the sale of GM seed and its
use in growing a GM crop, discussed subsequently, plaintiffs have relied
on one or more of these three principles. Lengthy treatises are needed
to describe these principles in their full complexity and differentiation
across the fifty states. What is provided here are some brief working def-
initions, as follows.
The Negligence theory of liability requires that the plaintiff estab-
lish that the defendant owed him or her a duty to exercise reasonable
care in conducting its activity, or in making or selling its product; failed
to meet that duty of care; and that this failure was the proximate cause
of the harm suffered by the plaintiff. An example would be a case in
which harm was caused by a defendant's production process (e.g., crop
growing) because the defendant had failed to use customary or standard
practices or comply with government regulations to ensure its safety.
Another example would be a case in which harm was caused by a defen-
dant's product because the defendant had failed to correct a manufac-
turing defect, a design defect, or had failed to warn and provide safe
use instructions to its customers or other downstream users about a non-
obvious hazard in using the product for its intended purpose.
Strict Liability theory requires that the plaintiff prove that the defen-
dant's allegedly harmful activity was ultra-hazardous, unreasonably dan-
gerous and contextually inappropriate, or that the defendant's product
was defective in its design, manufacture, or warning, and that the intrin-
sic defect was the proximate cause of the harm incurred by the plaintiff.
Thus, unlike the requisite for negligence, the plaintiff need not prove
that the defendant's behavior fell below a standard of care, which is usu-
ally a more difficult burden. Strict liability has been applied in cases that
involved, for example, harms arising from the manufacture or storage of
48
M. Baram,
Liability and its Influence on Designing for Product and Process Safety
,45
Safety Science 11-30 (2007).
