Category Archives: Products liability
‘Private Standards as Swords and Shields for Autonomous Vehicles’
Gary E Marchant, ‘Swords and Shields: Impact of Private Standards for Liability Determinations of Autonomous Vehicles’, 18 Journal of Tort Law 311 (2025). What happens when a self-driving car kills someone and there is no human driver to blame, no detailed public regulation to point to, and a jury that has never heard of ISO […]
Vuletić and Dumancic, ‘Liability For Damages Caused By Autonomous Driving Vehicles From The EU Law Perspective’
ABSTRACT The rise of autonomous driving vehicles and artificial intelligence systems presents significant legal challenges in various regulatory fields. Among them is main subject of this paper: liability for damages caused by autonomous driving vehicles. Common regulatory approach of liability caused by vehicles is based on fault or negligence. The legal subjects responsible for causing […]
Robert Pushaw, ‘The Original Understanding of Strict Products Liability’
ABSTRACT In the 1980s, George Priest published two seminal articles on the intellectual history of strict liability for injuries caused by defective products. First, he demonstrated that the states’ remarkably quick acceptance of such liability starting in the mid-1960s reflected the consensus among prominent legal thinkers of the wisdom of ‘enterprise liability’ theory, which had […]
Hong Wu, ‘Fault-Based Liability for Artificial Intelligence Torts’
ABSTRACT Attributing liability for torts caused by artificial intelligence (AI) constitutes one of the central and most challenging issues in AI governance. Neither the expansion of product liability nor proposals to confer legal subjectivity on AI systems provide a coherent framework for addressing AI-related torts. Legal risk must be distinguished from mere danger: the legal […]
Sudhanwa Joshi, ‘Tort at the Altar of Aviation Accidents: A Scholarly Study of Product Liability in Aviation’
ABSTRACT Aviation sits at a juncture where engineering prowess meets institutional fragility. Keeping airliners aloft demands meticulous integration of hardware, software and regulatory oversight, yet the pressure to minimise costs can allow subtle design flaws to slip through. The Boeing 737 MAX tragedies revealed how a software patch designed to compensate for aerodynamic shortcomings instead […]
‘Product Liability Reform’: Webinar (European Law Institute UK Hub), 19 January 2026
The Law Commission has embarked on a review of the UK’s legislation on liability for defective products. This review is very timely, because the current legislation dates back to the mid-1980s and was enacted as Part 1 of the Consumer Protection Act 1987, based on the EU’s Product Liability Directive adopted in 1985. Since then, […]
Michael Rustad, ‘Punitive Damages in Products Liability Revisited (1991-2024)’
ABSTRACT In August 2025, a Florida jury awarded a twenty-two-year-old female’s estate and another badly injured person two hundred million dollars in punitive damages in a case arising out of a 2019 Tesla crash that occurred when the car was in Autopilot mode. Punitive damages were based on the contention that Tesla’s Autopilot could not […]
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 […]
Warren, Cyhlarova, Carlisle, Knapp and Nolte, ‘The contaminated blood scandal in England: exploring the social harms experienced by infected and affected individuals’
ABSTRACT During the 1970s and 1980s, over 30,000 people in the UK were infected with HIV and/or hepatitis C because of treatment with blood and blood products for conditions such as haemophilia or through blood transfusion. We used the social harms perspective to understand the experiences of those affected. We conducted in-depth interviews with 41 […]
Gsell and Mayrhofer, ‘The New Product Liability Directive 2024: Missed Updates or Upgrades for the Interplay with National Liability Rules and for Service Liability’
INTRODUCTION The new Directive (EU) 2024/2853 on liability for defective products and repealing Council Directive 85/374/EEC of 23.10.2024 (hereinafter: ‘PLD 2024’) entered into force on 8.12.2024 and must be implemented by 9.12.2026. The European legislator acknowledges that the previous Directive 85/374/EEC on the approximation of the laws, regulations and administrative provisions of the Member States […]