Products Liability

I was reading RSS feed when I came across this article

Which says, in short, that the company that makes the Louisville Slugger should pay for the death of a kid, who was hit in the head with a baseball. The ball had been hit off of a aluminum baseball bat that was manufactured by Louisville Slugger. We can all agree that it is a tragedy that 18 year old Brandon Patch was killed, however should the company that manufactured that bat be held liable for his death?

When people sue each other in Torts, there is an area called Products Liability, which states that a manufacturer or distributor of a defective product can be held liable for the harm that it causes to the consumer. In this case the it was argued that the bat was defective in its warning to the consumer. It may be true that the manufacturer failed to warn of the dangers of the bat. However it is required that if they had put a warning on the bat, that it would have stopped the harm that happened.

The real question is, if Brandon had read the warning label on a bat that he did not own, and was not using, would he still been harmed? The answer is no, as a baseball player understands that there are risks associated with the sport of baseball. And those risks include being hit by a flying baseball. In law they call this assumption of the risk, a person can't sue for a injury that he or she knew they could suffer. However it has to be proven that the person injured assumed the exact harm that happened. So, did Brandon assume the risk of being hit in the face with a baseball? That is a question for the jury to decide, and as one of my professors says “Try a 100 different cases, get a 100 different verdicts”.

This case is one of the few examples where common sense and the law are in agreement, in that this court came to the wrong conclusion. There are many who say that cases like this are the reason that would should drastically reform the the judicial system. However I think this case shows the reason we need lawyers who have character, not just a drive for money.