Court Opinion

ID: 9678128
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 06:12:15.570484+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:17:02.058259
License: Public Domain

LOUIS J. CECI, J.
(concurring). I agree with the result reached by the majority. I wish to address briefly, however, a possible upshot of the dissents’ conclusion that a successor corporation may be held liable for a predecessor’s defective product under products liability law.
There is little justification for generally holding a successor accountable for its predecessor’s product de*313fects. And it is no justification for such a conclusion to reason that a small business successor may protect itself from liability by purchasing products liability insurance. Insurance is no longer the apparent panacea which it may have been at one time: where insurance is available at all, its high cost may make it prohibitively expensive for the average business to purchase. For example, South Bend Lathe, Inc. (South Bend II) most likely would have found it impossible to purchase insurance to protect itself from liability for a defective power press which was, at the time of South Bend IPs corporate succession, manufactured nearly twenty years earlier.
Where insurance is an unaffordable or unavailable alternative for protection from successor liability, businesses will have an increasingly difficult time selling or transferring corporate assets. In other terms, if the dissents’ conclusion ever becomes the law of this jurisdiction, the resulting high cost of insurance will serve as a compelling argument for the enactment of federal products liability legislation.