Product Liability: The Case of Cigarette Manufacturers - Essay Example

?Product Liability: The Case of Cigarette Manufacturers Introduction: Product liability refers to an area of law according to which different business manufacturing companies; distributing agencies, suppliers, as well as the retailers are held accountable in front of the local courts if the products or services they are offering to the public inflict injuries or are injurious to their health. Strictly on legal terms, the product liability refers to a particular situation. When some people or an individual are injured or harmed by a product which they consider as unsafe to the society in terms of their health, then they might have a cause of action against the company or a person who has manufactured, designed, advertised, or even has supplied or distributed to the customers in the market. In US, this trend is forcefully being adopted by many of the consumers who think that they have been harmed by these products and they really decide to take a legal action against those companies. This is the reason that there has been viewed a rapid growth of the litigation of product liability. This has even become an effective tool for the consumers to protect themselves as well as the society from the products that they consider harmful. The law has also been changed in this particular subject, i.e. from caveat emptor which means letting the buyer beware, to the strict liability for the manufacturing defects that the companies make which can also make the product irrational for the customers. Those manufacturers who actually produce or even distribute those products actually take the stance that this product liability has strengthened the customers’ legal representatives and it has also added an extra cost on the products that they are selling. They are also of the view that the harm inflicted to one person is a doubtful issue as there can be other reasons as well that might have inflicted him an injury and not their own product. So the heat is consistently generating across the US as well as other developed countries over the issue of product liability, in which the production companies are strongly opposed to the idea of one customers’ complaint to the court that might shut down even their whole business. What about those issues which are really dangerous for not just the one person but for whole society. The production companies are silent about those issues. The one and thorough example of the limited liability that seriously affects to, is the cigarette manufacturing companies. There are millions of people who want a legal action taken against these cigarette companies to be shut down as even the state laws say that smoking is really dangerous for health. In US in 2009, the most deaths in a year were the reason of the drugs and smoking. This is the reason that US society has now started taking strong actions against the cigarette manufacturing companies in US and this is the reason that now this case has been presented to the court and the hearings are now going on these days. Recently, the justices of the US Supreme Court have added two new cases to their docket which they considered the most serious to the whole society, and the cases were about drug and cigarette liability requirements. General theories concerning product liability: Most of the jurisdictions experience the cause of action of plaintiff to be based on the one or more than theories that they present in front of the judge(s). These theories are basically concerned with the negligence of the companies, breach of the warranty, misinterpretation of the product or service, and the strict tort liability. The negligence of the manufacturing companies actually refers to the irresponsibility, absence, and failure of the companies to exercise properly a care. A manufacturing company can be considered or held liable for the negligence it commits if the lack of the reasonable care in the production of a good, designing, or the assembling of particular good is done improperly, and in which the company is directly involved in causing a harm to its consumers. An example for this case would be a manufacturing company that might be found a but negligible if the workers of the company are not performing well and not giving the maximum output which is the only through which the requirements of the company as well as a perfect product are being made. In that case, a case can be filed against the management of the company due to their negligence as well as the sluggishness of the workers due to which the products being manufactured are not up to the mark in the sense that they are either not producing valuable result for the consumers, or are defective and are causing trouble to the customers who have bought them. Another theoretical stance of the plaintiff might be the breach of the warranty which actually refers to the malfunctioning or say, failure of the manufacturing companies in terms of their fulfillment of the terms and conditions that have promised themselves, e.g. the product specifications provided to the customers before they have bought a product do not exist in that particular product. Also the promises, or the claims that the companies have committed with their clients or consumers have not been made and a warranty for which the company has been paid is also not original one. In this case the law of a particular state actually assumes that the seller must give certain warranties to the buyers concerning the products being sold to them and also the seller must promise to meet the ideas or specifications that have been included in warranty. The failure to meet the requirements added in the warranty is the breach of the warranty or contract in terms of law. Third theoretical approach that the plaintiffs might adopt for suing a manufacturing company which is causing harm through its products is the misinterpretation of the product or service through advertising as well as sale promotion techniques. The main approach that the companies adopt which sound misinterpreted are related to giving the consumers false security concerning the safety of the specific product. The main purpose of the companies in this way is to draw the attention of the customers away from the hazards the use of the product can inflict them. The action then lies upon the potential camouflage of the potential hazards. The plaintiff must be able to then prove that he had actually relied and believed upon the promises that the company officials made with him. The last theoretical approach that might be adopted to prove the limited liability on a company is the strict liability, which involves the extension of the responsibility of the vendors or the manufacturers to all the people who might have been injured due to using the product that they are selling. The injured persons must then prove to be having the direct relationship with the use of the product that was manufactured by the company sued, and they must prove that potential damages were caused to them. They must also prove that the item of the said company was defective which cause them harm, and also that the defect was the main reason due to which they were injured, and then the defect has necessarily made the product actually dangerous for all the people. In light of the theoretical perspectives given above that might be the concerns of the plaintiffs due to which they have sued a company, the case study which has been chosen to be discussed will be the cigarette manufacturing companies. The next section will discuss the current – second wave of cigarette litigation – that will provide the concerns of the plaintiffs as well as the preemptive measures taken by the cigarette manufacturing companies which can prevent them from shutting down the business. The future of the cigarette litigation will also be discussed. The current – second wave – of cigarette litigation: In the current wave of the cigarette litigation, the plaintiffs have got a little success due to which different companies of a little influence in the market have been shut down. This success has been tagged as an anticipation which is largely unrealized. The first laws-suit of the second wave of cigarette litigation came to the scene in 1985, which was brought up by a 69 year old man who was a smoker, against the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. John Galbraith was the name of the plaintiff who sued the company. he actually brought the suite in 1982 against the said company by signing an allegory that he had been smoking cigarettes of the said company for decades which have caused him lung cancer. The attorney of the plaintiff, namely, Mr. Melvin Belli, argued that the cigarettes were actually addictive in nature and because of that Reynolds was liable for failing to warn smokers of this inherent product risk. The jury did not accept the ‘plaintiff’s addiction of tobacco’ argument and gave the verdict against the plaintiff’s right. The flaw in the case of Galbraith was definitely the inability to explain the cause, which as mentioned in the theories above, should be concerned with the defects included in the product of the cigarette producing companies. But in this case, the cause of the lung cancer was not considered directly the cigarettes but the addiction of the plaintiff which caused him having this ailment. The plaintiff, Mr. Reynolds Galbraith died in 1983 and his physician did not cite the reason of his death as the lung cancer. Rather he explained that according to his death certificate, he died due to the listed arteriosclerotic heart disease and pulmonary fibrosis as the main causes. But the causes of his death according to the jury were not really related to his addiction to smoking cigarettes, and therefore the case filed against the company again in 1985 was discharges again in the same year. However, the struggle of the plaintiffs was still going on, as they had been very promising to discourage of the use of smoking as a depressing relieving weapon used by youth as well as the mature people. The year 1988 was the first time when a jury gave the decision in the favor of plaintiff and against the cigarette manufacturing company, which was the first case of cigarette litigation. Therefore, Cipollone v. Liggett Group, Inc. became the first suit in cigarette litigation history in which jury awarded a plaintiff’s damages for an injury caused by the consumption of the harmful but inherent substances present in cigarette smoke. The Cipollone case began on August 1, 1983 when the plaintiff, Rose Cipollone, filed a complaint in the United States District Court for the District of New f ersey25 ' alleging that smoking the defendant's cigarettes had caused her to develop lung cancer. Mrs. Cipollone began smoking in 1942 at the age of sixteen, and, despite her various attempts to quit continued smoking from one pack to one-and-a-half packs of cigarettes daily until 1983 when her lung cancer was diagnosed as terminal. In October 1984, Mrs. Cipollone died from lung cancer. Her husband, Antonio, continued her product liability suit, both on his own behalf and as the executor of his wife's estate. Mrs. Cipollone's original complaint sought recovery from three cigarette manufacturers for causing her alleged smoking-induced illness. Her complaint sounded in strict liability, negligence, breach of warranty, and intentional tort. After approximately five years of litigation, during which time Mrs. Cipollone's original cause of action was severely limited; the jury awarded Antonio Cipollone $400,000 for his loss of consortium, but refused to award any damages to Rose Cipollone's estate for her smoking-induced illness and death. Responding to specific interrogatories, the jury found that prior to 1966 the defendant breached express warranties regarding its product's safety, and that during this same period the defendant manufacturer had also failed to warn smokers adequately of cigarette smoking's inherent health risks. The jury also determined that each cause of action proximately caused Mrs. Cipollone's lung cancer and death. The jury further concluded, however, that Mrs. Cipollone suffered zero damages and was 80 percent at fault for causing her own illness and cleath. Lastly, the jury found that the defendant was not liable for fraud or civil conspiracy. The Cipollone district court entered a judgment pursuant to the jury verdict, and affirmed this judgment in response to motions from both sides. The preemption defense from Cigarette manufacturers: Despite the reason and the fact that Cipollone v. Liggett Group, Inc. was the first case in which the product liability was applied on to a cigarette manufacturing company, and the one on which the liability was imposed on the company for inflicting the cause of illness caused due to smoking. On the other hand, this can also be considered as a defeat for the plaintiff, and it must not be recognized as a breakthrough recovery. This must be considered for a couple of reasons. The most significant smoker-plaintiff setback in Cipollone was, undoubtedly, the cigarette industry's successful implementation of the preemption defense. Since its introduction to cigarette litigation in 1984 the preemption defense has become the cornerstone of the tobacco industry's defense against tobacco product liability claims. The preemption defense was first raised by the defendant cigarette manufacturers in Cipollone in response to Mrs. Cipollone's original complaint. The preemption defense, as asserted in Cipollone, maintained that the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act (the federal act) preempted all of Mrs. Cipollone's tobacco product liability claims. On September 20, 1984, in response to the defendant's motion for a judgment on the pleadings and to Mrs. Cipollone's cross-motion to strike the affirmative preemption defense, District Judge H. Lee Sarokin of the United States District Court for the District of New jersey issued the first published opinion on the preemptive effect of the federal act on state common- law tort claims. After an extensive analysis of the federal act and its legislative history, Judge Sarokin held that the federal act did not expressly or impliedly preempt the plaintiff's state tort claims, and, as such, granted the plaintiff's motion to strike the preemption defense. So began the preemption controversy. The future of cigarette litigation: American courts considering the issue of preemption have unanimously held that the Federal Cigarette and Labeling Act do not expressly preempt state tort claims. The majority of these courts also ruled that the federal act did not indicate a congressional intent to "occupy the Field" of smoking and health so completely that it superseded state tort law. Thus, a court may find state tort claims preempted only to the extent that they "actually conflict" with federal law. But the recent wave of news reporting the federal judges taking the notice now against the companies which are manufacturing cigarettes might be a greater move towards banning tobacco products. That can seriously turn the businesses down of the companies. Work Cited: Global Settlement of Tobacco Litigation: Hearing before the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, United States Senate, One Hundred Fifth Congress, First Session, July 29, 1997. Washington: U.S. G.P.O., 1999. Print. Vargo, John F., and J. D. Lee. Cipollone v. Liggett Group, Inc.: U.S. Supreme Court Opens the Door to Tobacco Lawsuits. New York NY [etc.: M. Bender, 1992. Print. Sylla, Richard Eugene., and Robert Eric. Wright. Limited Liability. London [u.a.: Pickering & Chatto, 2003. Print. Sherrow, Victoria, and Alan Marzilli. Product Liability. New York, NY: Chelsea House, 2010. Print. Greenhouse, Linda. "Justices to Hear Cases on Product Liability - New York Times." The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia. 19 Nov. 2011. Web. 19 Nov. 2011. . Read More