Court Opinion

ID: 9486651
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 11:55:03.196119+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:51:50.895997
License: Public Domain

CUDAHY, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
I join Judge Flaum’s dissenting opinion. And, while I have the highest regard for my colleagues who may see the matter differently, I certainly agree with Judge Ripple that this question of Illinois products liability law has occupied a disproportionate share of this court’s attention. This is, after all, a diversity case. And so far as I can recall during my tenure here, this is the first such case to receive en banc review. Nonetheless, and despite Judge Ripple’s cogent arguments to the contrary, I suppose one bad turn deserves another. Having descended this far and at this cost into the morass, we might as well finish the job and put one more opinion of dubious authority in the books.
In my view as a federal observer of a state process, Judge Ripple’s concurring opinion when we first visited this matter, see Todd v. Societe Bic, S.A., 9 F.3d 1216, 1224 (7th Cir.1993) (Ripple, J., concurring), along with Judge Flaum’s opinion today, successfully demonstrate why the foreseeable user standard and the risk-utility test may properly apply here on the basis of the relevant Illinois eases. With respect to the foreseeable user standard, the majority goes to some pains to show the “absurdity” of using the knowledge and expectation of children as a measure of the “unreasonable dangerousness” of the product. Since children are unknowledgeable about danger, says the majority, and innocent of the ways of causation, they would contemplate little if any danger in almost any product. This would result in virtually absolute liability for the use or misuse of products by children. But the fact is that, in the case of products like lighters and knives, injury to some children is perhaps inevitable. The issue ought to be what party is best able to bear and distribute the cost of this inevitable injury — the child or the manufacturer. While the majority points to Illinois cases that suggest that it does not intend to make the manufacturer an insurer against injuries that result from the use of its product, Op. at 1406-06, cases like Doser v. Savage Mfg. & Sales, Inc., 142 Ill.2d 176, 154 Ill.Dec. 593, 568 N.E.2d 814 (1990), and Lamkin v. Towner, 138 Ill.2d 510, 150 Ill.Dec. 562, 563 N.E.2d 449 (1990), appear to point the other way. It is not clear to me whether employing a regime of tort law is preferable to requiring potential victims (or their parents) to go into the marketplace and buy insurance to guard against the cost of unavoidable accidents. While this question, in my view, should drive the policy analysis, our duty is not so much to evaluate policy as simply to predict (or guess at) the course of the Illinois courts.
With respect to the risk-utility test, again I am not sure that it is “absurd” to apply this measure to simple but obviously dangerous products like lighters and knives. Again, injury seems inevitable and the issue is whether it is properly part of the cost of manufacture or better borne by the victim. The point of strict products liability, after all, is “to minimize the costs of accidents and to consider who should bear those costs.” Note, Strict Products Liability and the Risk-Utility Test for Design Defect: An Economic Analysis, 84 Colum.L.Rev. 2045, 2049-50 (1984) (quoting Suter v. San Angelo Foundry & Mach. Co., 81 N.J. 150, 406 A.2d 140, 151 (1979)). Perhaps it is patronizing to deny consumers the opportunity to purchase “riskier” products at a lower price. This is not our choice to make, but I see nothing irrational in Illinois’ choosing the course it *1414thinks most sensible and socially appropriate. I therefore respectfully dissent.