Product liability

“ If a state organ or its personnel, while executing its duties, encroaches upon the lawful rights and interests of a citizen or legal person and causes damage, it shall bear civil liability.
Article 122
If a substandard product causes property damage or physical injury to others, the manufacturer or seller shall bear civil liability according to law. If the transporter or storekeeper is responsible for the matter, the manufacturer or seller shall have the right to demand compensation for its losses. ”

“ B was unwilling to enter the illegal scheme, was motivated principally by what he thought was economic necessity the need to avoid losing business by being unable to offer a major product line-and would have been only marginally deterred by the prospect of antitrust liability. ”

“ Great facilities are afforded in many of these states for the formation of manufacturing companies. The liabilities of partners not actively engaged in the management are limited to the proportion of the capital subscribed by each, and its amount is published in the official statement of the company. In the case of the introduction of a new invention, or a new manufacture, the principle of limited liability produces most beneficial results. ”

“ Whether a project be to make a railway from one small place to another, or to provide gas to supply any town, great or small, all those companies, as a matter of course, come to the legislature and ask for, and obtain, limited liability. They are commercial companies, and one cannot trace the reason why they should have limited liability a bit more than any other company—but it is so.'
Here we have at least a precedent, which is of importance in a country like this, so truly conservative in the sense of adhering to anything that is fixed law or matter of traditional business routine. ”

“ Where duties on the materials of manufactures are not laid for the purpose of preventing a competition with some domestic production, the same reasons which recommend, as a general rule, the exemption of those materials from duties, would recommend, as a like general rule, the allowance of drawbacks in favor of the manufacturer. ”

“ And it is too plain for argument that a manufacturer or vendor has no constitutional right to sell goods without giving to the purchaser fair information of what it is that is being sold. The right of a manufacturer to maintain secrecy as to his compounds and processes must be held subject to the right of the state, in the exercise of its police power and in promotion of fair dealing, to require that the nature of the product be fairly set forth. ”

“ The right to sell is clearly an incident to the right to manufacture or produce, and it is at least a question for the legislature to determine whether anything done to prepare a product most perfectly for the needs of the market shall not be treated as an incident to its growth or production. ”

“ The increasing of values in the manner aforesaid shall be deemed manufacturing, and any person, firm, company, or corporation engaged therein shall be liable to all the provisions of law for the collection of internal duties relating to manufacturers, as to licenses, returns, payment of taxes, liens, fines, penalties, and forfeitures. ”

“ Whether a corporation created for the purpose of dealing in lands, and to which the powers to purchase, to subdivide, and to sell, and to make any contract essential to the transaction of its business, are expressly granted, possesses, as fairly incidental, the power to incur liability in respect of securing better facilities for transit to and from the lots or lands which it is its business to acquire and dispose of? ”

“ The present case is not analogous to that of a sale of good will, or of an interest in a business, or of the grant of a right to use a process of manufacture. The complainant has not parted with any interest in its business or instrumentalities of production. It has conferred no right by virtue of which purchasers of its products may compete with it. It retains complete control over the business in which it is engaged, manufacturing what it pleases and fixing such prices for its own sales as it may desire. ”

“ The manufacturer, distributor or seller shall not charge a consumer who avails himself of the remedy as provided above of any expense and cost that may be incurred.
Article 12. Effectivity of Amendments and Revocation of Consumer Product Safety Rule. ”

“ They serve a useful purpose when read to relate to all steps, whether manufacture or not, which lead to readiness for putting goods into the stream of commerce. One who packages a product, or bottles a liquid, or labels, or performs any number of tasks incidental to preparing for shipment might otherwise escape the Act, for in a sense he neither manufactures, produces, or mines the goods. We are clear that 'handled' or 'worked on' includes every kind of incidental operation preparatory to putting goods into the stream of commerce. ”

“ More than that, the traditional common law rule still makes the most sense today. The manufacturer of a product is in the best position to understand and warn users about its risks; in the language of law and economics, those who make products are generally the least-cost avoiders of their risks. By placing the duty to warn on a product’s manufacturer, we force it to internalize the full cost of any injuries caused by inadequate warnings–and in that way ensure it is fully incentivized to provide adequate warnings. ”

“ The Limited Liability Act of 1862 gave great facilities for conducting business by companies of more than seven members, whose liability in case of a collapse does not exceed the amount promised on formation—a scheme inaugurated for the benefit of the working classes, but which has been misapplied in many instances. ”

“ Factory losses incurred as a necessary or normal incident to the completion of sales effected at a gain.
A sale resulting in a loss may not be offset by an infringer against another and independent sale resulting in a gain for the purpose of extinguishing or reducing a liability for profits. ”

“ In that case, we decided that trade associations which openly and fairly gather and disseminate information as to the cost of their product, the volume of production, the actual price which the product has brought in past transactions, stocks of merchandise on hand, approximate costs of transportation, without reaching or attempting to reach an agreement or concerted action with respect to prices or production or restraining competition, do not fall under the interdiction of the Act. ”

“ And where commodities have passed into the channels of trade and are owned by dealers, the validity of agreements to prevent competition and to maintain prices is not to be determined by the circumstance whether they were produced by several manufacturers or by one, or whether they were previously owned by one or by many. The complainant having sold its product at prices satisfactory to itself, the public is entitled to whatever advantage may be derived from competition in the subsequent traffic. ”

“ As already indicated, I should think that a shoring of 'sufficient economic power' in cases of this kind could be based upon a variety of factors, such as significant percentage control of the relevant market, desirability of the product to the purchaser, use of tying clauses which would be likely to result in economic detriment to vendees or lessees, and such uniqueness of the tying product as to suggest comparison with a monopoly by patent. ”

“ He will be heard with no more patience in an endeavor to diminish liability by ascribing his profits to the capacity indwelling in a patent. Whatever is at his call in the service of the enterprise-brawn and intelligence, f ctories and lands, patents and machinery-will be viewed upon an accounting as if held upon a quasi trust to contribute what it can to the profits of the business. The wrongdoer must yield the gains begotten of his wrong. ”

“ Does the manufacturer exist for the consumer or does the consumer exist for the manufacturer? If the consumer will not—says he cannot—buy what the manufacturer has to offer, is that the fault of the manufacturer or the consumer? Or is nobody at fault? If nobody is at fault then the manufacturer must go out of business. ”

“ In these cases the source of the manufacturer's liability was his negligence in the manufacturing process or in the inspection of component parts supplied by others. Even if there is no negligence, however, public policy demands that responsibility be fixed wherever it will most effectively reduce the hazards to life and health inherent in defective products that reach the market. It is evident that the manufacturer can anticipate some hazards and guard against the recurrence of others, as the public cannot. ”

“ Whether a producer of goods should be permitted to fix by contract, express or implied, the price at which the purchase may resell them, and if so, under what conditions, is an economic question. To decide it wisely it is necessary to consider the relevant facts, industrial and commercial, rather than established legal principles. ”

“ Nothing we have said bars a supplier, consistently with other provisions of the antitrust laws, from utilizing his wholesalers to distribute payments or administer a promotional program, so long as the supplier takes responsibility, under rules and guides promulgated by the Commission for the regulation of such practices, [24] for seeing that the allowances are made available to all who compete in the resale of his product. ”

“ An act or practice shall be deemed unfair or unconscionable whenever the producer, manufacturer, distributor, supplier or seller, by taking advantage of the consumer's physical or mental infirmity, ignorance, illiteracy, lack of time or the general conditions of the environment or surroundings, induces the consumer to enter into a sales or lease transaction grossly inimical to the interests of the consumer or grossly one-sided in favor of the producer, manufacturer, distributor, supplier or seller. ”

“ If justice is to be done, all these questions, and many more like them, must be answered, even thought it is beyond the power of the human intellect to do so. Of course, the difficulties enumerated are passed along the line. The manufacturer has to meet it; the wholesaler, in turn, is governed by what the manufacture has to guess at, before the retailer has his turn. ”

“ A determination of material injury shall be based on positive evidence and involve an objective examination of the relevant factors, including the volume of production by the covered investment that has received non-commercial assistance, the effect of such production on prices for like goods produced and sold by the domestic industry, and the effect of such production on the domestic industry producing like goods. ”

“ In this way it often proves to be of great value to the manufacturer in preventing the substitution and sale of an inferior and different article for his products. It becomes his trade-mark, and the courts will protect him in its exclusive use, either by the imposition of damages for its wrongful appropriation or by restraining others from applying it to their goods and compelling them to account for profits made on a sale of goods marked with it. ”

“ The owner/manufacturer of a product must compensate the consumers should his product harm them in any manner that they were not explicitly, clearly, visibly and repeatedly warned against. Moreover, he should even make amends if the product failed to meet the reasonable and justified expectations of consumers, based on such warrants and representations. ”

“ The residuum or refuse of various kinds of manufactories is more or less valuable for certain purposes, and may be, and often is, the subject of sale; but it is not expected that the skill and attention of the manufacturer is to be devoted to the quality of the refuse material. ”

“ Free access to the markets through unobstructed channels of commerce is the very breath of the life of such manufacturing establishments; and to say that complainants are not specially injured by the conduct of defendants seems to me to require that the eyes be closed to the evidence in the case and to the familiar facts of commerce. ”

“ Moreover, every manufacturer, before sale, controls the articles he makes. With respect to these, he has the rights of ownership, and his dominion does not depend upon whether the process of manufacture is known or unknown, or upon any special advantage he may possess by reason of location, materials, or efficiency. The fact that the market may not be supplied with the particular article unless he produces it is a practical consequence which does not enlarge his right of property in what he does produce. ”

“ The fact that products lose their character as 'goods' when they come into the actual physical possession of the ultimate consumer does not affect the coverage of the act as far as the employees producing the products are concerned. The facts at the time that the products are being produced determine whether an employee is engaged in the production of goods for commerce, and at the time of the production of the containers they were clearly 'goods' within the meaning of the statute since they were not, at that point of time, in the actual physical possession of the ultimate consumer. ”

“ The exact truth always lies in the knowledge of the manufacturer. His books show, or ought to show, everything that he has produced, and in an investigation of this kind, if he shows that his returns or stamps fully equal the amount of his production and sale, the burden will then be on the government to show a deficiency. ”

“ I think that upon such an order the merchant trusts to the skill of the manufacturer, and is entitled to trust to it, and that there is an implied warranty that the manufactured article shall not, by reason of the mode of manufacture, be unfit for use in the manner in which goods of the same of material, and the same general character and designation, ordinarily would be used. ”