South Square Private Law Seminar: 'Social Welfare and Three-Party Problems: Vicarious Liability, Product Liability, and Rescuers'

Speaker: Dr Jacob Eisler, University of Cambridge

Defect analysis in the law of product liability is in disarray. Courts have ignored that decisions under the Consumer Protection Act are determined by users’ expectation regarding unlucky outcomes from product use, even as cases have implicitly adopted positions on this issue. The current state of the law indicates that users accept all adequately disclosed probabilistic outcomes, including harmful ones, and that thus users should bear the costs of ‘unlucky’ outcomes. In contrast, now-disfavoured precedent indicates that users do not expect any particular instance of product use to be harmful and thus should be protected from bearing such loss. The material issue is the psychological characteristics imputed to users, though courts have evaded directly addressing this topic. Thus this article proposes fundamental reconceptualization of product liability defect analysis.

This seminar is open to all LLM, MCL and PhD students, Faculty members and Faculty visitors.