Products Liability

1. A manufacturer's or seller's tort liability for any damages or injuries suffered by a buyer, user, or bystander as a result of a defective product. • Products liability can be based on a theory of negligence, strict liability, or breach of warranty. 2. The legal theory by which liability is imposed on the manufacturer or seller of a defective product. 3. The field of law dealing with this theory. — Also termed product liability; (specif.) manufacturer's liability. See liability. — products-liability, adj.

“The law of products liability is that body of common and statutory law permitting money reparation for substandard conduct of others resulting in product-related injury to the injured party's person or property. Resistance to the description of products liability as a doctrine having receded, there is today a guiding tenet in the law of product-related injury that is the distillate of seventy years of decisional law. The birth of the doctrine can be dated at 1916, the publication of the immensely influential decision in MacPherson v. Buick Motor Co., [217 N.Y. 382, 111 N.E. 1050 (1916)], in which the New York Court of Appeals held that the manufacturer of any product capable of serious harm if incautiously made owed a duty of care in the design, inspection, and fabrication of the product, a duty owed not only to the immediate purchaser but to all persons who might foreseeably come into contact with the product. Following MacPherson, the doctrine as formed by decisions of the ensuing decades is that a buyer, user, consumer or bystander in proximity to an unreasonably dangerous product, and who is injured in person or in property by its dangerous propensities, may recover in damages from the manufacturer or intermediate seller.” 1 M. Stuart Madden, Products Liability § 1.1, at 1–2 (2d ed. 1988).

strict products liability. (1964) Products liability arising when the buyer proves that the goods were unreasonably dangerous and that (1) the seller was in the business of selling goods, (2) the goods were defective when they were in the seller's hands, (3) the defect caused the plaintiff's injury, and (4) the product was expected to and did reach the consumer without substantial change in condition. 

PRODUCTS LIABILITY, Black's Law Dictionary (9th ed. 2009)