Conk on Comparative Products Liability Jury Instructions

George Conk has posted one of his older pieces to SSRN:  Compared to What?  Instructing the Jury on Product Defect Under the Products Liability Act and the Restatement (Third) of Torts:  Products Liability.  The abstract provides:

Products liability litigation relating to mechanical devices has centered on the concept of design defect, specifically, the unreasonable failure of a manufacturer to take advantage of current design capabilities that would reduce or even eliminate a product’s potential dangers. The Restatement (Third) of Torts: Products Liability (Restatement (Third)), promulgated by the American Law Institute in 1997, places the focus of design-defect litigation on proof of the existence of an alternative, safer design for a product, which demonstrates that the product was not designed to be reasonably safe.

The Restatement rejects the long-dominant consumer expectations test of defect and asserts that the risk-utility analysis everywhere relied up must specify that the plaintiff prove as a fact that there was available a safer alternative design which, if omitted, renders the product not reasonably safe.

By concretizing the relevant design-defect considerations, we will be better able both to hold the designer to the ideal of prudence and to avoid the uncritical sympathy for the injured that courts have long seen as a danger of unclear limitations on liability. In case after case, courts uphold verdicts rooted in risk-utility proof and argument – on the balance of costs and benefits of improving the safety of a product’s design – without inquiring closely into how to formulate the balance properly.  The New Jersey Products Liability Act states that it is a complete defense if: “At the time the product left the control of the manufacturer, there was not a practical and technically feasible alternative design that would have prevented the harm without substantially impairing the reasonably anticipated or intended function of the product.”