Products Liability, Cases and Materials (American Casebook Series)

This edition of the casebook remains sufficiently flexible to meet widely varying needs. It is appropriate to use in a two- or a three-hour course. The structure of the book permits omission of entire chapters or portions of chapters without disrupting the flow of the course. The book is arranged so that the core of products liability law is presented in the first six chapters, but the materials may also be taught out of order. Topics include misrepresentation and warranty law, defects and reasonableness, cause-in-fact, proof, proximate cause and damages. The remaining chapters cover core topics in products liability litigation. After a brief introduction, Chapters 1 and 2 address the application of misrepresentation and warranty law to products cases. These theories remain viable in most jurisdictions and in a few jurisdictions that never adopted the Restatement (Second) of Torts Section 402A, they remain at the core of modern products liability law. Chapters 3 and 4 address the development of modern products liability law and its defining characteristic: its focus on the concept of “defect” rather than the concept of reasonableness. Chapter 4 systematically presents materials on manufacturing, design and warning defects organized around Section 2 of the Restatement (Third) of T(more...)