Product Liability

Product liability law is meant to compensate persons injured by defective products and to deter manufacturers from marketing such products.

Product liability laws in some states fail to send clear signals to manufacturers about how to avoid liability, and hold manufacturers liable for failure to adopt certain designs when the manufacturers neither knew, nor could have anticipated, the risk.

ATRA supports legislation that: governs all product liability actions, irrespective of the theory on which they are brought, so that plaintiffs cannot evade the law by inventing new theories of recovery; permits a plaintiff to recover damages only upon proof that the product was defective and that the defect was the cause of the harm; sets out clear rules for determining when a product is defective; provides clear standards for establishing liability based on manufacturing defects, design defects, and warning defects; provides clear rules requiring proof of causation.