Proving Fault for Defective Product Injuries
If you've been injured by a dangerous consumer product, it's usually not hard to recover compensation for your injuries.
Defective or dangerous products are the cause of many thousands of injuries every year. The set of laws that covers who is responsible for defective and dangerous products -- called "product liability" -- is different from ordinary injury liability law, and sometimes makes it easier for an injured person to recover damages.
Strict Liability Defined
Ordinarily, to hold someone liable for your injuries, you must show that they were careless -- that is, negligent -- and that their carelessness led to the accident. (To learn more about this basic rule, read General Rules for Proving Fault in Accidents.)
With products sold to the general public, however, it would be extremely difficult and prohibitively expensive for one individual to have to show how and when a manufacturer was careless (negligent, in legal terms) in making a particular product. Neither can the consumer be expected to prove whether the seller or renter of the product had a proper system for checking for manufacturer's defects, or whether the seller was the cause of the defect after receiving the product from the maker. Nor, finally, can a consumer be expected to check each product before using it to see if it is defective or dangerous.
For all these reasons, the law has developed a set of rules known as "strict liability" that allows a person injured by a defective or unexpectedly dangerous product to recover compensation from the maker or seller of the product -- without showing that the manufacturer or seller was actually negligent. In short, if you have been injured by a consumer product, you are entitled to compensation from the manufacturer or from the business that sold or rented the product directly to you.
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