Court Opinion

ID: 9722776
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 09:49:54.422623+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:24:39.991489
License: Public Domain

Armstrong, J.
(concurring). The practice of admitting postaccident design changes to show the feasibility or practical possibility of an improved design arose out of cases involving physical improvements to products or premises. See, e.g., Beverley v. Boston Elev. Ry., 194 Mass. 450, 458 (1907); Coy *439v. Boston Elev. Ry., 212 Mass. 307, 309-310 (1912); doCanto v. Ametek, Inc., 367 Mass. 776, 780 (1975). In the sphere of physical improvements the notion of “feasibility” has a meaning and relevance which it lacks in the area of changes in warnings, for it is obviously always “feasible” to employ a more prominent or more urgent-sounding or more particularized form of warning. But in Schaeffer v. General Motors Corp., 372 Mass. 171, 175-176 (1977), the concept of feasibility was extended into the area of warnings to justify the admissibility of postaccident changes, and that decision controls the same evidentiary point in the instant case.
As to our holding that the jury could properly find the earlier warning inadequate, it bears emphasis that the holding rests on something more substantial than mere size of type or number of exclamation points: namely, the qualitative insufficiency of the warning to inform the user of the gasoline-like tendency of the cement to form heavier-than-air vapors which, unless dispersed, will flow in an invisible stream to distant sources of ignition.