Product liability
The mass tort product liability explosion

Early proponents of strict liability believed its economic impact would be minor because they were focused on manufacturing defects. They failed to foresee the logical implications of applying the rule to other types of product defects. Only in the late 1960s did Americans begin to draw a clear analytical distinction between manufacturing and design defects, and since the early 1980s, defective design claims "have formed the overwhelming bulk" of American product liability lawsuits. It was "the unintended application of 402A to the design context" which resulted in the explosion of mass tort product liability cases during the 1980s throughout the United States. In the federal judicial system, the number of product liability civil actions filed per year increased from 2,393 in 1975 to 13,408 in 1989, and product liability's percentage of all federal civil cases increased from 2.0% to 5.7% during the same period. These numbers reflect only a small portion of the 1980s explosion in product liability cases; the vast majority of American lawsuits are heard in state courts and not federal courts.
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