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Abstract

Since the advent of strict products liability with the holding in Greenman v. Yuba Products Co. in 1963 and the promulgation of section 402A of the Restatement [Second] of Torts ("Restatement") in 1965, courts have struggled to strike an appropriate balance between competing social policies with respect to liability for defective products. On the one hand, those injured by defective products should not be burdened by the contractual intricacies of the law of sales or the onerous (virtually insurmountable in products cases) evidentiary obstacles of negligence. On the other hand, most courts agree that manufacturers and distributors should not be absolute insurers, liable for any injury resulting from the use of their product. Originally, one of the primary justifications for adopting strict liability was to mitigate the evidentiary burdens of negligence. Negligence principles, along with warranty concepts, yielded unjust results and proved to be inadequate and unsatisfactory as consumers continually lost under these theories. As a California court noted, "the very purpose of our pioneering efforts in this field was to relieve the plaintiff from problems of proof inherent in pursuing negligence." Hence, under strict liability, a plaintiff need not prove faulty conduct by the defendant manufacturer. Almost since the initial development of strict liability, courts have divided on whether a totally fault-free theory of liability is appropriate for all defective products cases. Despite attempts by various courts to develop a theory of strict liability for products that is totally distinct from negligence, confusion and controversy continue to characterize the ambiguous role negligence plays in strict products liability actions. The debate over the role of negligence principles in strict liability dates back to the promulgation of section 402A in 1965. Dean Wade observed in that year: "[T]he test for imposing strict liability is whether the product was unreasonably dangerous, to use the words of the Restatement . . . . It may be argued that this is simply a test of neglignece. Exactly." The strict liability-negligence controversy most often arises when the alleged defect is the product's intended design rather than an unintended flaw in its manufacture. Many courts and commentators have suggested that such "design defect" cases, in which the manufacturer's conscious design choice for an entire product line is being impugned, unavoidably and aptly implicate negligence principles. The rationale behind strict liability realistically applies only to defects resulting from manufacturing flaws, they argue, and thus the theories are practically indistinguishable in design defect cases. Others have adamantly persisted in contending that a distinct theory of strict liability can and should apply to design, as well as manufacturing, defects. Maine courts recognized the ongoing debate in 1983 in Stanley v. Schiavi Mobile Homes, Inc. The Stanley court stated: "Currently, there is a split of opinion as to whether a distinction exists between negligence and strict liability theories of recovery when applied to cases based upon design defects." Despite this observation, the Stanley court reached its decision without addressing this conflict of opinion. Recently, however, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, sitting as the Law Court, was squarely presented with the issue it declined to address in Stanley. St. Germain v. Husquarna Corp., in effect, applied a negligence theory to a strict liability claim for injuries caused by a defective design, intimating that in Maine the theories are virtually indistinguishable in design defect cases. A review of the various tests that have emerged in the context of the national controversy surrounding the role that negligence principles should and do play in the evaluation of defective designs reveals that a fault basis is inextricable from any design evaluation. An assessment of a conscious design choice invariably involves an assessment of the knowledge and conduct of the manufacturer that led to the choice. Evaluating a manufacturer's consciously chosen design under a negligence-type fault standard is most appropriate because it is consistent with the purposes and policies of the law of products liability and tort law in general. Maine's St. Germain decision, which was foreshadowed by a number of earlier strict liability cases, contributes to the integrity of our tort system by adopting negligence as the proper standard to be applied to the defective design claims.

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