Court Opinion

ID: 9584968
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 22:54:21.676382+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:24:33.753276
License: Public Domain

On Motion for Rehearing.
Addendum
The appellee files a motion for rehearing, arguing that the majority opinion creates distortions in the law of product liability by holding that a plaintiff may assume the risk of a product defect of which he had no prior knowledge and by establishing a different standard for product-liability plaintiffs who are direct users and consumers of the product and those who are not. We write this addendum in order to clarify our holdings in the majority opinion and demonstrate that the majority opinion does not have the untoward effects suggested by the appellee.
The rule, as clearly established by the citations of authority in the majority opinion, is that the defense of assumption of risk, although not the defense of contributory negligence, is applicable in a product-liability case. What the trial judge charged the jury here was that the plaintiff could not hold the defendant liable for his injuries if he knowingly and voluntarily risked the injuries, not that the plaintiff was barred from recovery if he knowingly and voluntarily risked the alleged product defect. As we see it, there are really two forms of assumption of risk: (1) assumption of risk of the product defect, and (2) assumption of risk of the physical injuries incurred. In most product-liability cases, the manufacturer’s defense will be that the plaintiff assumed the risk that the defect in the product would produce the injury sustained by using it with actual knowledge of the defect. In an automobile-tractor collision case such as this, where the plaintiff is not the driver of the tractor alleged to have a defect, we see no reason why the defendant cannot have a defense that the plaintiff *521assumed the risk of the collision by failing to avoid it and that any defect in the tractor was not the proximate cause of the collision. Thus, the defendant Deere has two interrelated defenses, and we cannot say that the trial judge’s charging the jury on one defense but not the other created such error as to require the reversal of a verdict in favor of the defendant.

Motion for rehearing denied.

All the Justices concur, except Clarke, Smith and Gregory, JJ., who dissent.