Category Archives: Products liability
Deimantė Rimkutė, ‘The Regulatory Function of the New Product Liability Directive’
ABSTRACT The year 2024 marked a turning point for EU delict law, as the EU adopted a new Product Liability Directive to replace its 1985 predecessor. The new Directive, however, does more than modernise product liability law. It also reflects a deeper shift in how the EU uses private law as a tool of governance. […]
Jan van Staalduinen, ‘Is There a Manufacturer in the House? On Contractually Shaping European Product Liability for Co-Created Medical AI’
ABSTRACT Hospital AI applications can be developed in several different ways: they can be developed by an external software development company (SDC), they can be developed internally in the hospital, or a hospital can work together with an SDC to jointly develop an AI application. The chosen arrangement has ramifications for the liability of the […]
Luke Meier, ‘The Liability of Online Marketplaces for Tort Injuries in America’
INTRODUCTION More and more, Americans are buying products online rather than at traditional brick and mortal stores. A significant portion of these online purchases occur through ‘online marketplaces’, which are platforms that connects third-party sellers with buyers. The largest online marketplaces are household names – Amazon, Ebay, and Etsy being among the prominent examples. The […]
Beck and Deguire, ‘Toward a Framework for a Law of Electronic Intangibles Liability’
ABSTRACT Products liability law was built for a world of gears, levers, and physical failure. It now confronts a marketplace dominated by software, data, algorithms, and artificial intelligence – objects that do not break, shatter, or wear out, but nevertheless cause real and sometimes catastrophic harm. Courts and commentators increasingly respond to this tension by […]
Hurwitz and Lu, ‘An Initial Assessment of Standards in Technology Tort Litigation’
ABSTRACT Standards are a central preoccupation of AI governance, yet the dominant policy conversation – focused on regulatory compliance and coordination – does not capture how standards actually function in the legal domain most likely to govern AI-related harms: tort law. This Article offers an empirical and doctrinal assessment of standards in technology tort litigation, […]
W Nicholson Price, ‘Monitoring, Oversight, and Learning in Medical AI’
ABSTRACT When medical AI errs, it often goes unnoticed. If there’s a specific patient injury, and the link to AI is obvious, that problem might be reported to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), but not always. And many other types of problems, like worse performance on specific groups or ineffective integration into health system […]
Olivia Grice, ‘From Clicks to Claims: Redefining Products Liability in the Amazon Era’
INTRODUCTION As Americans scroll through their TikTok and Instagram feeds looking for the next Amazon ‘dupe’, a pressing question awaits: If this product causes an injury, who is responsible? The most logical answer is the person who made the product or the party who is responsible for the defect that caused the injury. What if […]
Gill and Keil, ‘Teleology Predicts Intuitive Judgments of Liability’
ABSTRACT People possess a teleological stance: we represent artifacts in terms of intended function. Yet, modern tort law is largely agnostic to function in product liability cases: jurors are instructed to permit any foreseeable use or misuse. Here, across three pre-registered studies (N = 742), we examine intuitions on product cases, exploring the downstream consequences […]
Martin Petrin, ‘When AI Hurts: Corporate Responsibility for Agentic AI’
ABSTRACT As AI systems evolve from assistive tools into increasingly autonomous, agentic actors, long-standing doctrines of corporate liability are being put to the test. This Essay examines whether existing legal frameworks can hold corporations accountable for harms caused by advanced forms of AI. It suggests that, first, existing private law doctrines continue to provide a […]
Stefano Natangelo, ‘Nobody’s Fault: Where Liability Collapses in Clinical LLM Deployment’
ABSTRACT A hospital deploys a software system that recommends treatments to clinicians. The system produces a recommendation that is clinically harmful but formally indistinguishable from a correct one. The clinician follows it. The patient is harmed. Who is liable? Under existing legal doctrine, the answer is reliably the clinician. Developers invoke software-as-service classification. Deploying institutions […]