Product liability
Landmark legal cases

The third step was the landmark California case of Greenman v. Yuba Power Products, Inc. (1963), in which the Supreme Court of California openly articulated and adopted the doctrine of strict liability in tort for defective products. Greenman heralded a fundamental shift in how Americans thought about product liability towards a theory of enterprise liability—instead of basing liability on the defendant's "fault" or "warranty", the defendant's liability should be predicated, as a matter of public policy, on the simple question of whether it was part of a business enterprise responsible for inflicting injuries on human beings. The theoretical foundation for enterprise liability had been laid by James as well as another law professor, Leon Green. As noted above, it was Greenman which led to the actual emergence of product liability as a distinct field of private law in its own right. Before this point, products had appeared in case law and scholarly literature only in connection with the application of existing doctrines in contract and tort.
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