Consumer injuries

The early consumer products made in America were cars (thanks to Henry Ford) and fizzy drinks (Coca-Cola). These products also illustrate classic injuries to consumers.

Defects in cars that led to accidents were common. The question arose whether the injured driver or passenger had to prove the fault of the manufacturer, or this could be presumed.

In Germany, a 3 year-old took a bottle from a crate and it exploded, injuring him. The cause was unexplained. The German courts found the manufacturer liable. Once the child’s parents had shown that the bottle was defective and that the cause would normally be within sphere of control of manufacturer, then the manufacturer was liable unless he showed the safety of the bottle’s content and that he had a system to check safety status of re-usable bottles. Similar cases occurred in France (1964), the Netherlands (1931) and Italy (1960), but the last two required the consumer to prove the fault of the manufacturer.

In the Italian Saiwa case (1964), a man and his wife suffered a food poisoning and had to face medical expenses as the consequence of eating some biscuits, produced by Saiwa, which had gone off. So, they asked the compensation of the damages jointly from the producer and the retailer of the product. The Corte di Cassazione affirmed the retailer could not be held liable for the compensation, neither in contract nor on tort, because the biscuits had been sold in sealed boxes and it was not proved he had been negligent in storing the product. But it held that the manufacturer could be presumed to be at fault, since it controlled the quality of the product.

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