Product liability
History

Common law courts began to shift towards a no-liability regime for products (except for cases of fraud or breach of express warranty) by developing the doctrine of caveat emptor (buyer beware) in the early 1600s. As personal injury and product liability claims began to slowly increase during the early First Industrial Revolution (due to increased mobility of both people and products), common law courts in both England and the United States in the 1840s erected further barriers to plaintiffs by requiring them to prove negligence on the part of the defendant (i.e., that the defendant was at fault because its conduct had failed to meet the standard of care expected of a reasonable person), and to overcome the defense of lack of privity of contract in cases where the plaintiff had not dealt directly with the manufacturer (as exemplified by Winterbottom v. Wright (1842)). During the Second Industrial Revolution of the mid-to-late 19th century, consumers increasingly became several steps removed from the original manufacturers of products and the unjust effects of all these doctrines became widely evident.
length_constraints:number_words[193], change_case:english_capital