Court Opinion

ID: 9629458
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 09:43:14.320134+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:07:19.637907
License: Public Domain

Utter, C.J.
(concurring) — I concur in the opinion of the majority.
*127Petitioner contends first that some "reasonable person" standard must inhere in the trial of a claim alleging failure to adequately warn of a product's dangerous potential, and second, that proof of negligence is therefore indispensable to the cause of action. While the first assumption is correct, the second does not follow from it.
Dean W. Page Keeton has articulated the applicable standard in the following manner:
a product is unreasonably dangerous at the time of sale if the ordinary man, knowing the risks and dangers actually involved in its use, would not have marketed the product without supplying more information about the risks and dangers involved in its use and ways to avoid harm therefrom.
Keeton, Products Liability — Inadequacy of Information, 48 Tex. L. Rev. 398, 403-04 (1970). See also, the comparable formulation in Wade, On the Nature of Strict Tort Liability for Products, 44 Miss. L.J. 825, 839-40 (1973); and Twerski, Weinstein, Donaher & Piehler, The Use and Abuse of Warnings in Products Liability — Design Defect Litigation Comes of Age, 61 Cornell L. Rev. 495, 511-12 n.45 (1976).
Reasonableness is an implicit attribute of the "ordinary" person postulated by Dean Keeton. It is explicit in the formulations of the other commentators. But under no formulation is this reasonable person assumed to be the actual manufacturer or supplier appearing as defendant in the product liability suit. As is apparent in the standard, the reasonable person, like the jury itself, is posited to know the risks inherent in distribution of the product without sufficient warning, as well as the costs and effects of providing such a warning. There is no issue as to negligence on the part of the hypothetical reasonable person.
As the majority holds, the jury focuses its attention on the product itself and the dangers inherent in its condition *128and manner of distribution. The postulated reasonable person is merely a vehicle to objectify the jury's own judgment regarding the product as placed in the stream of commerce.
Horowitz, J., concurs with Utter, C.J.