Product Warning Labels Do They Protect Manufacturers From Product Liability Lawsuits Term paper

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Product Warning Labels-Do They Protect Manufacturers?

MG260, Business Law I

We have all purchased a new consumer product with several labels, stickers, and product inserts containing warnings, disclaimers and oversimplified directions. The warnings can actually be humorous at times as illustrated in the following examples:

· On Sears hair dryer: Do not use while sleeping

· On Marks & Spencer Bread Pudding: Product will be hot

after heating.

· On Rowenta Iron: Do not iron clothes on body.

· On Nytol (a sleep aid): Warning: May cause drowsiness.

· On a Swedish chainsaw: Do no attempt to stop chainsaw

with your hands.

(http://www.tagmag.com/spam)

Obviously, with a little common sense, your average consumer can avoid the injuries that the above statements are attempting to warn against. One can argue that these warnings provide protection to the manufacturers against lawsuits based upon personal injury.

There are many infamous cases where damages were awarded to consumers due to a personal injury resulting from what is claimed to be negligence, failure to warn or a product defect. According to public opinion, some of these lawsuits are frivolous and are causing the decline of our civil justice system. An examination of cases against tobacco companies will provide us with some conflicting information regarding product warning labels. Do they provide manufacturers with adequate protection against this type of lawsuit?

By law, product manufacturers are responsible to give a reasonable warning when the product they manufacture poses a foreseeable risk of injury or harm. Courts use the following factors to consider a manufacturer's duty to warn: "the magnitude or severity of the likely harm, the ease or difficulty of providing an appropriate warning, and the likely effectiveness of a warning" (Mallor, etal. 377) in addition to the manufacturer's ability to reasonably foresee the risk.

Are people drying their hair while sleeping or ironing clothes while wearing them foreseeable risks? As lawsuits become more outrageous, so do the warnings and there is an outcry for reform in our civil justice system to minimize frivolous lawsuits. According to a poll conducted by Nation's Business magazine (February, 1998) 2/3 of the businesses that responded had been named as defendants in product liability lawsuits. An overwhelming majority felt that frivolous lawsuits are definitely a problem and that "people who file lawsuits (should) pay the defendant's legal fees if they lose". Eighty percent were in favor of a "federal law being enacted to supersede conflicting state laws on the liability of a company if someone using it's product is injured".

Courts use a risk/utility analysis to determine whether the risks associated with certain inherently unsafe products are reasonable. To make the determination, courts weigh the availability of safer alternatives and whether the risks of using the product outweigh that product's utility. The myriad of lawsuits against tobacco companies certainly raise this issue to a point of controversy.

Do the warning labels placed on cigarettes and tobacco products preclude most personal injury claims against the manufacturers? In a recent case brought against R. J. Reynolds, an ex-smoker suffering from terminal cancer was awarded $20 million in punitive damages and $1.7 million in compensatory damages. "The jury found that the tobacco companies acted with malice, that they knew the health hazards of smoking and deliberately misled the public about the dangers of smoking" (CNN.com). The plaintiff, Leslie Whiteley prevailed in this case even though every single pack of cigarettes she ever purchased was affixed with the attorney general's warnings against the dangers of smoking. Defense attorney, William Ohlemeyer commented "Mrs. Whiteley never smoked a pack of cigarettes that didn't have a health warning on it that was written by the Surgeon General." She did not begin smoking until after the federal government made this a requirement for all cigarette packages, but the warning labels did not protect the company from liability in this case. The plaintiff's attorney, Madelyn Chaber was quoted as saying "Warning labels are one thing, but they don't give the company a license to lie".

This award is potentially disastrous to the tobacco industry. One is left to wonder if the jury's decision was based mostly on the high level of emotion associated with this dying woman's claim. If based on the risk/utility analysis, the jury can be assumed to have found that cigarettes pose a risk much higher than any utility they provide. If the jury's decision is based upon this analysis, one could reasonably assume that we will not have seen the last of this type of award. Comments from the plaintiff's attorney and the jury seem to suggest that the verdict is based more upon the company's misrepresentation as to whether or not nicotine is addictive.

"If ever a substance deserved the designation 'inherently unsafe', it is nicotine, the psychoactive ingredient in tobacco." ("Are Warnings Good Enough?" 55). Modern research suggests that heavy smokers who go just two hours without a cigarette show brain wave activity that is so severely disrupted that there is virtually no ability to process information. This is consistent with other addictive substances.

Assuming that this type of lawsuit will arise regardless of product...

Mallor, Jane and A. James Barnes, Thomas Bowers, Michael Phillips,
and Arlen Langvardt. Business Law and the Regulatory Environment.
Boston, MA: Irwin McGraw-Hill, 1998.
"Are warnings good enough?" U.S. News & World Report 8 April 1991:
v110 n3 p55
Zegart, Dan. "Breathing fire on tobacco." The Nation 28 August 1995:
v261 n6 p193
Siegfried, Willis A. "Defending Against Failure-to-Warn Lawsuits."
Engineering and the Law 20 August 1998
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