Court Opinion

ID: 9491952
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 14:28:32.46601+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:55:01.956462
License: Public Domain

JON 0. NEWMAN, Circuit Judge,
concurring:
When this diversity appeal was first before us, we were sufficiently unsure about how the case should be decided under New York law that we asked the New York Court of Appeals to answer two questions. The first was whether a manufacturer that designs a product in a reasonably safe manner can nonetheless be held negligent for failure to warn about a product’s danger that results from a modification of the product after its sale. The New York Court of Appeals answered that such failure-to-warn liability can exist. In order to understand how New York would apply its tort law in this rather unusual context, we also asked the State’s highest court whether such failure-to-warn liability is a fact issue for a jury under the circumstances of this case. Unfortunately, the Court of Appeals declined to answer the second question.
The Court of Appeals’ decision not to answer our fact-specific inquiry is understandable, since the certification process is most usefully employed to resolve unsettled issues of law. However, in many contexts a full understanding of a state’s legal standard may be achieved only by seeing how a state’s highest court would apply that standard to the specific facts of a case. I think that is so in this case, and I would have been extremely interested to see how the New York Court of Appeals would have applied its failure-to-warn standard to the facts of Liriano’s injury resulting from his somehow placing his hand into the spout of Hobart’s meat-grinder from which the safety guard had been removed long after Hobart sold the product. Nevertheless, in the absence of a definitive Court of Appeals answer to our second question, we, as a diversity court, must make our best prediction as to how New York courts would answer that question had this case been tried in a state court. I am in considerable doubt as to what that prediction should be, but for reasons similar to those set forth by the majority, I agree that the New York Court of Appeals would most likely permit the liability issue in this case to be decided by a jury, and I therefore concur.
Like the majority, I see no need to decide how this ease would have been resolved had Hobart manufactured its meat-grinder without a safety guard — the circular plate above the spout with holes large enough for pieces of meat but small enough to prevent insertion of a hand. Instead, the issue for us is whether a New York court would permit a jury to consider liability for failure to warn of the danger of using the meat-grinder after a safety guard, originally installed, has been removed. Some might think it should make no difference whether a safety guard was originally installed so long as the machine the user confronts lacks such a guard. After all, the obviousness of the danger of placing one’s hand into the unguarded spout of a meat-grinder is the same for a person using a machine that was never equipped with a guard as for a person using a machine manufactured with a guard that was later removed. But the circumstances confronting the user of these two machines vary in two respects potentially relevant to the issue in this case.
First, if the second machine visibly indicates that it once was equipped with a safety guard, the user is alerted to the danger of using the machine without a device that the manufacturer thought was advisable for enhancing safety. For example, if the safety guard was attached by some form of latch, the opening of which permitted removal of the guard, and if the latch bore the legend “lock safety guard here,” the user of a machine from which the guard had been un*274latched and removed could reasonably be found by a jury to have had his appreciation of the danger enhanced, beyond what he should reasonably have perceived simply by seeing the open spout and knowing what happens to objects placed into that spout. To whatever extent such enhanced appreciation of the risk is relevant, it undermines the plaintiffs claim, since a manufacturer need not warn of an obvious risk and certainly need not do so as to a risk that is even more obvious than the risk presented by a machine that was never equipped with a guard. The tendency of a removed guard to enhance the user’s awareness of the risk is uncertain in this case, however, because the safety guard that was originally installed was not secured by a latch (and there was no legend concerning its attachment). Instead, is was bolted to the meat-grinder, and the record is unclear as to what conclusion, if any, a user could reasonably draw from the appearance of the machine as to the previous existence of a guard.
The second circumstance implicated by the previous existence of a safety guard is the one discussed in the Court’s opinion — the availability of the option of insisting upon a machine that has a guard, rather than facing only the choice between using a machine with a guard and not using the machine that lacks a guard. The Court’s opinion offers the example of a steep road marked in one instance with a sign that warns “Danger — Steep Grade” and in another instance with a more informative sign indicating the option of an alternate route that avoids the steep grade. The example is not precisely analogous to our case because the record gives no indication that an alternate machine with a safety guard was as readily available as an alternate driving route. Moreover, the option of a driver to choose an indicated alternate driving route immediately available is more realistic than the option of a supermarket employee to insist on a machine the availability of which is entirely uncertain. Nevertheless, the Court’s analogy usefully indicates a circumstance common to both the Court’s example and our case: the alternate means of proceeding more safely is an option known to the entity that bears a relationship to the dangerous condition and is not known to the person encountering the danger. When that disparity of knowledge exists, may liability be imposed by a fact-finder for failure to warn of the alternative?
This becomes the critical question in this case, and we have no firm basis on which to predict the answer New York’s highest court would give to it. An injury occurring as a result of a rather obvious danger but one that might have been avoided by an alternative known to a product manufacturer and not known to a likely user of the product has not been considered by the New York Court of Appeals, and appears not to have been directly confronted by other New York courts. Perhaps the most relevant clue is the observation that the Court of Appeals made in its response' to our first question in this case: “where reasonable minds might disagree as to the extent of the plaintiffs knowledge of the hazard, the question is one for the jury.” Liriano v. Hobart Corp., 92 N.Y.2d 232, 241, 677 N.Y.S.2d 764, 769, 700 N.E.2d 303, 308 (1998). I am not sure that reasonable minds could differ as to the extent of a store employee’s knowledge of the hazard of placing his hand in the open spout of a meat-grinder, but I think it likely that the Court of Appeals would rule that reasonable minds might differ on the closely related question concerning the extent of the employee’s knowledge of a safer alternative, i. e., avoiding use of a machine from which a safety guard had been removed and requesting a machine with the guard in place. For that reason, and in the absence of the clear answer we requested from the Court of Appeals, I agree that Liriano’s case was properly submitted to a jury for its decision.
One final comment is warranted. Those who believe that every decision in human affairs is a rational one, influenced logically by the incentives and disincentives that inhere in a given set of circumstances, will think it perverse that a manufacturer can be liable for failure to warn about the hazard of a meat-grinder originally equipped with a safety guard that has subsequently been removed even though liability might not exist had no such guard been initially installed. Surely, the devout rationalists will say, a rule of law countenancing such seemingly contra*275dictory results will create an incentive for meat-grinder manufacturers not to install safety guards in the first place, thereby obtaining at least the chance to escape liability that, under today’s decision, is deemed appropriate for jury consideration. I acknowledge that the disincentive to install a safety guard might exist, but, as with many predictions made on the assumption that a disincentive to take action will result in the action not being taken (or that an incentive to take action will result in the action being taken), I think it is extremely doubtful that meat-grinder manufacturers will elect to forgo safety guards in the hope of avoiding failure-to-warn liability for meat-grinders from which such guards have been removed. We have been well advised that the life of the law is not logic but experience, see Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., The Common Law 1 (Little, Brown & Co. 1990)(1891), and it is often the case that the life of life itself is not logic. Though rationality guides many human actions, it does not guide them all. Despite the disincentive arguably created by the imposition of liability in this case, manufacturers might well elect to install safety guards simply because they have some concern (humanitarian, not economic) that hands should not be severed by their machines. Moreover, if our decision correctly predicts New York law, manufacturers of meat-grinders equipped with safety guards can readily avoid liability for injuries resulting from use after the guard has been removed by the inexpensive furnishing of some reasonable form of notice of the hazard of using the machine without the guard. Hobart has already acted in this direction by placing on its machine a warning against use if the safety guard has been removed. Thus, the circumstances giving rise to Hobart’s liability in this case are unlikely to arise again.
For all of these reasons, I concur.